On 11/18/2010 11:27 AM, Daniel Fetchinson wrote:
I do a recursive evaluation of an expression involving fractions and
unsurprisingly the numerator and denominator grows pretty quickly.
After 10-20 iterations the number of digits in the numerator and
denominator (as integers) reaches 80-100. And I'm wondering until what
point I can trust the result since I'm using fractions.Fraction for
the whole procedure. Are Fraction's infinite precision?
'Unbounded' (except by memory) would be be more accurate.
Or will I get
some sort of an exception if python is not able to represent the
numerator and/or denominator as integers?
I believe you could eventually get MemoryError. But you might get tired
of waiting first. I tried
i=0
n=2
while True:
print(i)
n *= n
i += 1
The 30th doubling (I believe to a billion bit or 128 megabyte number, on
a gigabyte machine) took a few minutes and I killed the program after
that as it tried to page everything else out to disk.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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