Smalltalk - Re: Factorial, p175

Re: Factorial, p175

Posted by blake watson on Oct 09, 2013; 4:34pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/Factorial-p175-tp4713318p4713611.html

Oh, it's huge. And it prints out instantly. :-) (Though I did notice it printed out instantly when I ran the equivalents in Python and Ruby, too.)

I remember wrestling with this problem in the '90s: How do you make a number that sizes itself according to its contents? So I can be impressed.

But if I'm a novice or someone who's used to working in dynamic languages, I'm not going to understand, I don't think, why I should be impressed.

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 10:06 PM, stephane ducasse <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello

We will rephrase the sentence. The point is that 1000 factorial more than a single integer.
Did you check its number of digits?

Stef

On Oct 9, 2013, at 12:11 AM, blake <[hidden email]> wrote:

> "Note that 1000 factorial is really calculated which in many other languages can be quite difficult to compute. This is an excellent example of automatic coercion and exact handling of a number."
>
> I think what's trying to be said here is that--no, I don't get the first sentence at all. In what language is it difficult to compute a factorial? I guess a lot don't have built-in functions but--I feel like I'm missing the point.
>
> Then I think, maybe the point is you would have to do the coercion and "exact handling" of the number, as indicated in the next sentence, and that's what's meant by that. But the beginning reader isn't going to know what that means.

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