On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 7:57 AM, Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> wrote:That's plausible as a representation, and looks tempting, but basic
> I think he's saying make a new type similarly to complex, only instead of
> two floats to make a complex number, have a (long) int and a decimal float
> to make this new type. The long int portion would have infinite precision,
> the float portion would have, say, 16 digits (or whatever).
arithmetic operations become more complicated. Addition and
subtraction just need to worry about carries, but multiplication forks
out into four multiplications (int*int, int*frac, frac*int,
frac*frac), and division becomes similarly complicated. Would it
really be beneficial?