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Arithmetic Operations on Very, Very Long Decimals

I've always been curious: how can I perform arithmetic operations on very long decimals--for example, calculating pi to the 3000th decimal place (especially in an imperative language)?

Solution

  • Use a language or library that supports arbitrary precision numbers...?

    In Python, ints will auto-promote to longs which are arbitrary size. You could use a second value for keeping track of how many decimals to shift over by to get a sort of arbitrary precision floating point.

    In Java you could use the BigDecimal class, which represents "Immutable, arbitrary-precision signed decimal numbers".

    I'm sure other examples exist in other languages.