True. But to be fair, this is not a problem specific to LiveCode. It's a generic problem in any programming language - eventually you will run into the limits of the math library and the limits of the processor. The limits aren't always immediately obvious, and some "trickery" is then necessary to redefine the problem space.
As Mark states this 'problem' isn't specific to LiveCode. Indeed, when I was checking my fibonacci implementation (by checking its output values against fact) I used a web-based fibonacci generator. It was clearly using double arithmetic (with the limitations it has in terms of precision at magnitude).
There are problem-domains which require arbitrary precision integers, but the majority of day-to-day problems we face when writing computer software means we never encounter those limits.
There's a huge history of you should 'only pay for what you use', and unless you have an appropriate architecture the price you pay for using arbitrary precision integers can be huge in comparison to just using doubles.
Now, LiveCode should (morally) be a language where you don't have to worry about such things so if you need larger integers it should just work; we have a better architecture now which means we can start looking to make this reality, but we aren't quite there yet implementation-wise.
-- Mark Waddingham ~ [email protected] ~ http://www.livecode.com/ LiveCode: Everyone can create apps _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
