Avatar

Short answer is no, AFAIK (DBO)

by ZackDark @, Not behind you. NO! Don't look., Tuesday, November 24, 2015, 20:18 (3047 days ago) @ uberfoop

There's nothing in particular preventing you from representing huge numbers on a computer. Such representations couldn't be used "natively" in the execution units, but it's not like the human brain has streamlined up-arrow registers and execution pipelines either.

That's what I meant.

Speed is a potential issue if you're going reeeaaaaallllyyyy big and need an exact answer, but with billions of 64-bit ops per second available, you can get a decent amount of work done in reasonable time.

And that is the long answer. :p

(and even before that point, there are big limitations in how large one operator is compared to the other).


I'm not quite sure what you're referring to here.

Was talking about how you can't sum 2e63 with 2e-63 and have the answer in a single byte without losing precision, even when the system is capable of storing up to 2e63 and down to 2e-63.


Complete thread:

 RSS Feed of thread