blake wrote:

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.
  

That is a good point.  A description of the typical problem would be useful. 
Blake, Do you want to have a go at it ? :)

Thanks very much for your feedback, but in case it can interest you have you seen...
http://blog.openinworld.com/2012/05/contributing-to-pbe/

cheers -ben

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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