Alex Shinn <alexshinn@gmail.com> writes:

> On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> wrote:
>
>     Alex Shinn <alexshinn@gmail.com> writes:
>     > Exact arithmetic can run out of memory.
>
>     So can your proposed inexacts.  In order to avoid underflow and
>     overflow, the number of representable values cannot be finite,
>     because
>     there can be no maximum or minimum representable magnitude.
>      Therefore
>     the amount of memory needed to represent your numbers is
>     unbounded.  No
>     matter how clever your compression method is, that fact is
>     unavoidable.
>
> It's not a compression technique, and the amount of
> memory is in practice bounded by the limitations of
> computation.

What external representation will you use for these numbers?  For
example, even if you can efficiently handle something like this:

  (do ((i 10000000 (- i 1))
       (x 1e300 (expt x x)))
      ((zero? i) (/ x)))

What will you do if someone applies 'number->string' to the result?

    Mark

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