On Tuesday, April 11, 2006 @ 8:04 PM, Maura E. Monville wrote:
Is it possible that on a 32-bit machine the maximum value for a Real number in Tcl language is 10^10 ?
Instinctively I'd saythe number of bits assigned to the representation of a Real number is independent on the machine h/w architecture ... but I'm not familiar with Tcl and may be mistaken ...
Thank you, MEM Well, I'm just waging here, but in order to store an ordinate of 10, the computer would only need to have 4 bits assigned to store said ordinate. 10 would be 1010. I don't know anything about TCL language, but, if you can't store a number of that size, it's not a hardware issue, certainly not on a 32 bit machine. But it's pretty safe to say that the maximum ordinate is indeed dependent on machine architecture. I mean, if you have 64 bits available instead of 32, you can store both more precision and more order of magnitude than on a 32 bit machine. Now, whether the particular language you are coding in is aware of the fact that it has those extra bits to work with is a totally different matter.
Greg Wallace P. S.: Fellow list members more knowledgeable about hardware, if I'm off base here, then you have permission to shoot me.