I had a need the other day for dealing with some really big
numbers.  Unfortunately, the machine I was using did not have
[mpexpr] installed.  Woe is me.  Until I came up with the following
fast and very dirty workaround.  Works on Unix systems and Windows
systems with Cygwin:

 proc mpexpr { args } {
  return [ exec echo $args | bc -l ]
 }

 % mpexpr 12342342354564636*94852304570297207525
 1170699616126044020647089347918085900

Is it a cheat?  Well, yeah, it's a cheat.  But it was darn handy!

[CMcC] I've written [bignum], a quick critcl wrapper for libgmp, giving arbitrary precision ints and floats.


[Sarnold] I have written a little multiple precision arithmetics proc in pure Tcl : it is available at http://sarnold.free.fr/index.html.
mailto:stephanearnold(at)tele2(dot)fr
It does only treat positive integers. (But it is perfect for factorials, mod, power, etc...)

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[Category Mathematics]