Chris Angelico wrote:
I believe the 'bc' command-line calculator can do a-p non-i, and I know REXX can
Yes, bc is wonderful in this regard. Actually, bc does this sort of thing in 'circles' around Python. This is one of Python's weaknesses for some problem solving... no arbitrary precision. And its not just that bc does arbitrary precision--- its that it does it fast!
Actually, it should be relatively easy to incorporate parts of bc into Python as C extensions. On the other hand, when needing specialized math work from bc, its probably just better to use bc and leave Python alone.
On the other hand, most of the time (and I mean 99.999% of the time) floats are going to work just fine... usually folks don't even need doubles.... :)
With fifteen or twenty digits of PI we can calculate the circumference of the visible universe to within the width of a proton... er, I mean hadron... and you know what... how many folks need to do that anyway??
Don't get me wrong... I absolutely love playing around with bignums, but then, I'm a math geek... ;-)
kind regards, m harris -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
