Complex Numbers & binary fractions

[Cubist at aol.com]

sez beat.c at hetnet.nl:
>has anyone made a library for working with complex numbers? And is 
>willing to share this with me? I'm also looking for some code to 
>convert decimal fractions (i.e. 0.56384) to binary  fractions.
   Haven't played with complex numbers, sorry. For converting decimal 
fractions to binary, however, something like this might work:

function DecFrac2BinFrac TheFrac, ThePrecision
  # TheFrac is *assumed* to have nothing to the *left* of the decimal point
  # ThePrecision is *assumed* to be a positive integer
  # you can write the code to handle those cases yourself, if need be, right?

  if ThePrecision = "" or ThePrecision < 1 then put 10 into ThePrecision
  # so the user can just supply a fraction and not care

  set the numberFormat to "0.#####"
  #you want to make sure there's a leading 0 before the decimal
  put "." into Rezult
  repeat # yes, it's an infinite loop. the escape test will be inside it
    multiply TheFrac by 2
    put char 1 of TheFrac after Rezult
    # because of numberFormat, char 1 here should be either 0 or 1
    if the length of TheFrac > ThePrecision  or TheFrac = 0 then exit repeat
    delete char 1 of TheFrac
  end repeat
  return Rezult
end DecFrac2BinFrac

   You really do have to worry about the precision of the result. Most 
decimal fractions simply don't *have* exact representations in binary; unless you 
explicitly define the precision, thus telling the code when to bail out, any 
non-binary-exact decimal fractions will cause the code to grind along forever, or 
until the growing length of the binary representation overfills all available 
RAM. Not good.

   Hope this helps...