Large what.. mantisaa or exponent? Mantissa precision is probably what you seek. Many languages have IEEE double precision math available if you "ask for it" and diligently verify that it's in each and every step. That should give about a 64bit mantissa IIRC. HP calculators have larger mantissa capability than any other scientific calculators and that's probably enough for your math. I've done lengthy calculations requiring one part in 10 million precision throughout on HP scientific calculators, and that's a lot easier than programming something to keep that precision unless it's an automated and repetitive process. Gotta be real careful that any programming math package may have some functions that limit the overall precision of the calculations to about 1 part in a million or less. Transcendentals are usually not very good. Calculations in optics and some laser work are unforgiving however, and demand the precision to get any useful result. Chuck -----Original Message----- From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org [mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org]On Behalf Of Tim Wilson Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 4:58 PM To: Jay Austad Cc: tclug-list at mn-linux.org Subject: Re: [tclug-list] large number calculator 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. -Tim -- Tim Wilson Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA Educational technology guy, Linux and OS X fan, Grad. student, Daddy mailto: wilson at visi.com aim: tis270 blog: http://technosavvy.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20060313/7119cbb9/attachment.htm