Chris Angelico wrote:
Sure, but nobody said the text file had to be _stored_ anywhere :) Computers are quite capable of working with streams of incoming data that are potentially infinite in size.
However, they *can't* work with arbitrary real numbers in an exact way, even if they are represented by infinitely long digit streams, and you're willing to run the program for an infinitely long time to get the result. Consider adding two of these numbers, for example. You have to do it starting at the big end, because the small end is infinitely far away. And you only have a limited amount of buffer space, so you need to start writing out result digits before you've seen all the input digits. But you can't do that, because it's possible that some pair of input digits you haven't seen yet will cause a carry-over that ripples back and affects something you've already written out. This is where schemes such as computable reals get into trouble. Doing arithmetic with them gets extremely messy. -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
