3 ms·
What do you mean you can "only meaningfully do 22 different factorials within the bounds of a 64-bit architecture anyway"?
by nwellinghoff 9y ago
What do you mean you can "only meaningfully do 22 different factorials within the bounds of a 64-bit architecture anyway"?
- logfromblammo 9y agoThe 52-bit mantissa of a 64-bit double is only sufficient to represent all the significant figures of 22! and a 64-bit integer can only represent 20!, so if you want larger factorials with full precision, you need to use more bytes for your numeric representation. Not many real-world applications require precision greater than a double, but pure mathematics can calculate millions of [decimal] digits of an irrational number just for amusement. A cryptography application, for instance, would need full precision, whereas an engineering problem might be perfectly fine with fewer significant digits.