Arbitrary as in user-specified, yes.  I'd like a BigFloat class whose
numeric precision can be set to anything I want.

I can see two options:

1) Have a pool variable called "precision" and be able to set that when I
   want to change the precision.

2) Specify the precision separately for each instance of BigFloat.

I think (1) is much better because it's simpler and I don't have to worry
so much about operations which combine different precision floats.

The interface might look like:

    BigFloat setPrecision: 100. "100 decimal place precision."
    a := BigFloat fromFloat: 5.0.

Even nicer would be to add lexical support for BigFloats, but that would be
much more work.

Mike


> From: danielv at netvision.net.il
> Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 21:20:11 +0300
> 
> What does that mean? how do you represent irrational numbers? or is that
> arbitrary as in user specified, as different from infinite?
> 
> Michael Vanier <mvanier at cs.caltech.edu> wrote:
> > 
> > Has anyone implemented code for arbitrary precision floating-point numbers
> > in squeak?
> > 
> > Mike
> 
>