Arbitrary precision - two or three approaches

[Paul Dale]

I've seen a few arbitrary precision packages over the years. One that sticks in my mind was done in Haskell, sadly I don't remember it's name. The premise was that a number was represented as a sequence and whenever more digits were required, the sequence was extended until the desired digit values could be guaranteed to be correct. Want more digits later, keep extending.

Being Haskell and having lazy evaluation, it essentially built an expression tree for the computation and when more digits were required, potentially all the the nodes in the tree could be extended. Pretty neat idea but very memory intensive.


Pauli