range error - or "How to take the factorial of a huge

[Stephen Messimer]

Jim

Thanks for your help.  After looking at your first response I thought 
that It might be possible to combine the  two sets of calculations and 
sum them but as it turns out the factorial of any  number > 169 results 
in an overflow error so it seems doing the factorials of numbers <= 169 
and then those > 169 wouldn't work.

I will use the information you provided in your earlier post and see if 
that works.

Again, I really appreciate your taking the time to help.

Best regards

Steve
On Friday, April 9, 2004, at 01:15 AM, 
use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

>> Type	Operators *: range error (overflow)
>
>    Another possibility aside from recursion overflow (the more obvious
> one - I'm missing the forrest for the trees here) is that the number is
> just too big for whatever datatype MetaCard is using to represent
> numbers.  I don't know how you get around this one though, short of
> using a CPS'd function as an XCMD.  There *might* be a way to split the
> number up into smaller units, and then combine them at the end in some
> way, but I have no idea how - I'm thinking of the "Saturn" BCD
> architecture used by some calculators, and the recursive fast-multiply
> algorithm for multiplying truly huge numbers (hundreds or thousands of
> digits each..)
>
> Jim
>

Stephen R. Messimer, PA
208 1st Ave. South	
Escanaba, MI 49829
http://www.messimercomputing.com
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