François THIMON <thimof at iutc3.unicaen.fr> wrote:

>
> the largest integer I can write in this language).
>
You might be surprised just how big that is; a LargePositiveInteger can be as
big as memory (roughly, anyway) which on an OS with virtual memory etc can turn
out to be awfully large.

Just for an amusing illustration, try

7000 factorial

and 'print it'.  It will take a while, but nearly all the time is taken by the
printing part. It's a 900+ byte LPI with 23878 digit decimal value

700 factorial is a lot smaller and faster to handle, being merely 1690 digits.

tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Avoid GOTOs completely if you can to keep the program readable.