What programming language will enable me to enter a very long number without converting it to floating point?

Question

What would be the best way to do the following.

Enter a very long number, lets say 500,000 digits long without it going into scientific notation; and then am able to

Answer 1

Mathematica allows you to do such math and you can write complete programs in it.

Otherwise, what you seek is a "library" to extend the built-in functionality of another programming language, such as Python or Java.

In the case of Python, the decimal module enables you to specify a precision in which math operations will be peformed.

Answer 2

Python does this out of the box with no special library. So does 'bc' (which is a full programming language masquerading as a calculator) for Unix systems.

Answer 3

What you're looking for isn't necessarily a language, but an arbitrary-precision library.

GMP would be a fast implementation in C/C++, and scripting languages that handles big integers would probably use something like that.

Answer 4

Many functional languages natively support arbitrary-precision numbers. Some have already been mentioned here, but I'll repeat them for completeness:

• Most versions of Haskell.
• Miranda, a predecessor to Haskell.
• Some implementations of Scheme. In particular, PLT Scheme.
• Erlang.

Answer 5

Haskell (when using GHC) also has builtin support for arbitrarily long integers. Here's a snippet showing the length of a number converted to a string.

Prelude> length $ show $ 10
2
Prelude> length $ show $ 1 + 2^2000000
602060
Prelude> let x = 2^200000
Prelude> let y = 2^200000 + 5
Prelude> y - x
5

Or you could just type 2^200000 at the interactive console and wait a couple minutes for it to print out all 600k+ characters. I figured this way was a little simpler to demonstrate.

Answer 6

Perl has a bignum module to do that sort of thing, and Python supports it natively.