[Michel Paul]
> When a student first sees Long integer capabilities a question often is "How
> many
> digits of pi can it show?" There's a slight disappointment when they find
> out that
> though there's a Long integer, there is no Long decimal.
The newish `decimal` module has user-settable precision, although it's
more educational to use integers. See the pi() function at:
http://docs.python.org/dev/lib/decimal-recipes.html
> I would like to be able to show them a good way to compute a list of an
> arbitrary
> number of digits in the decimal expansion of of pi. I think they might find
> that
> interesting.
See the very old Demo/scripts/pi.py in a Python distribution -- it's
one of the first things Guido coded in Python. Although I'm
considered a numerical expert, I still have no idea how it works :-)
An enormous number of ways you /could/ proceed:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PiFormulas.html
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