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I was paraphrasing from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic#... So
by gamegoblin 12y ago
I was paraphrasing from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic#...
So in the 50s they had integers with up to 2^9 - 1 (== 511) decimal digits.
In the 60s, the transistor-based one could do integers as big as your memory, the largest memory offered gave you up to 60K digits.
- ScottBurson 12y agoOkay, very good. I stand corrected. (Well, mostly. I would pedantically argue that you may have arbitrary-precision arithmetic, but you don't have arbitrary-precision integers until they're a functional datatype, so you can write simply 'a + b' to add them -- with the automatic allocation that that in general requires. But this is a quibble.)