Data types for extraordinarily large or long numbers, eg 10^1000000 or pi

[Caffiend]

This question is probably to complex to be answered quickly, but if you could even point me in the right direction that would be great! I am interested in knowing how to work with extremely large numbers, say like trying to find primes in excess of a million digits, or calculating pi to the billions of decimal places. Obviously even unsigned __int64 would be insufficient to process this (Never mind that I could not afford a computer capable of doing it in a reasonable amount of time). I would presume using a larger base number system would simplify things, but how would one write a program which calculates in base 16 or 32 rather than 10? Thanks for your help!

- Justin

[Ganon11]

Hmm...writing a program to perform mathematics in hex...That would be very interesting.

I could imagine writing a class hexNumber that would hold an integer in string form, then overriding the operators for basic math by manipulating the hexNumbers classes.

[RedSon]

This question is probably to complex to be answered quickly, but if you could even point me in the right direction that would be great! I am interested in knowing how to work with extremely large numbers, say like trying to find primes in excess of a million digits, or calculating pi to the billions of decimal places. Obviously even unsigned __int64 would be insufficient to process this (Never mind that I could not afford a computer capable of doing it in a reasonable amount of time). I would presume using a larger base number system would simplify things, but how would one write a program which calculates in base 16 or 32 rather than 10? Thanks for your help!

- Justin

There should be a data structure in which you can define arbitrarily large numbers. If not you can just reserve a massive amount of memory and use a stream writer to save your number to that memory. As for arithmetic calculations, you will likely need to implement your own addition and subtraction algorithims.

[RedSon]

also please see http://www.answers.com/topic/arbitra...ion-arithmetic