Arbitrary precision arithmetic with Ruby

Question

How the heck does Ruby do this? Does Jörg or anyone else know what\'s happening behind the scenes?

Unfortunately I don\'t know C very well so bignum.c is of little

Answer 1

You could read the source for bignum.c...

At a very high level, without going into any implementation details, bignums are calculated "by hand" like you used to do in grade school. Now, there are certainly many optimizations that can be applied, but that's the gist of it.