On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, Tim Wilson wrote:

> On Mar 13, 2006, at 4:43 PM, Jay Austad wrote:
>
>> I need to do some calculations on very large numbers, and bc won't
>> handle it.  Does anyone know if a good tool which doesn't really have
>> a limit on the size of numbers that it can deal with?  Something
>> preferably free, I only really need to do one calculation to find out
>> the probability of something, but it's fairly complex and has huge
>> numbers in it.
>
> Python handles large ints pretty well. You could just fire up the python 
> interpreter (type 'python' in a shell) and start entering your numbers is 
> regular mathematical notation.

Given that bc will handle 2^65536, I'm not sure.  bc already does 
arbitrary precision bigints- if bc doesn't handle it well, I'm not sure 
what does.

Brian