How Does It Work?

[storm5510]

How does P95, or any other numeric application, work with numbers which are made up of millions of digits?

I've been a programmer for over 20 years and I do not know of any data type in any programming platform that can do this.

[Mini-Geek]

http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=7128

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by storm5510

I've been a programmer for over 20 years and I do not know of any data type in any programming platform that can do this.

It's time for you to acquire, and start studying, The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP) by Donald E. Knuth. This work should be in the personal library of every serious practitioner of computer science. It's on many lists of best technical literature of our time. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art...er_Programming)

Chapter 4.3 in TAOCP Volume 2 is about multiple-precision arithmetic. It explains the basics of:

a) representing integers that are too large to fit within a single computer word (or other data type element),

b) performing arithmetic on such multiple-precision integers,

c) modular arithmetic on multiple-precision integers, and

d) fast multiplication of multiple-precision integers.

[lfm]

Originally Posted by storm5510

How does P95, or any other numeric application, work with numbers which are made up of millions of digits?

I've been a programmer for over 20 years and I do not know of any data type in any programming platform that can do this.

Simply put (it gets much more complex when you start optimizing) use an array of numbers for each number. similar to when you do arithmetic by hand you can treat a number as an array of digits and operate on one "digit" at a time.