How does bc work

[Dave Mitchell]

On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 12:24:18PM +0100, Dan Track wrote:
> Thanks for the heads up :). I realise its going to be big but it all
> started from someone challenging me about how quick my workstation
> could do that calculation. I've only started to see that bc might be
> eating up my memory, and was wondering if there's a way round this.

Not really. Fundamentally it needs to store a 272 Mdigit number in memory,
plus probably a similar amount or two for the intermediate calculations.
If this wont fit in RAM, then add some swap. This means the OS is
automatically handling the copying of partial results to disk and back,
rather than bc having to manage it manually.

-- 
Nothing ventured, nothing lost.