Five programming problems every Software Engineer should be able to solve in less than 1 hour

[Mark Waddingham]

> True. But to be fair, this is not a problem specific to LiveCode. It's
> a generic problem in any programming language - eventually you will
> run into the limits of the math library and the limits of the
> processor. The limits aren't always immediately obvious, and some
> "trickery" is then necessary to redefine the problem space.

As Mark states this 'problem' isn't specific to LiveCode. Indeed, when I 
was checking my fibonacci implementation (by checking its output values 
against fact) I used a web-based fibonacci generator. It was clearly 
using double arithmetic (with the limitations it has in terms of 
precision at magnitude).

There are problem-domains which require arbitrary precision integers, 
but the majority of day-to-day problems we face when writing computer 
software means we never encounter those limits.

There's a huge history of you should 'only pay for what you use', and 
unless you have an appropriate architecture the price you pay for using 
arbitrary precision integers can be huge in comparison to just using 
doubles.

Now, LiveCode should (morally) be a language where you don't have to 
worry about such things so if you need larger integers it should just 
work; we have a better architecture now which means we can start looking 
to make this reality, but we aren't quite there yet implementation-wise.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps