How does bc work

[Dan Track]

On 10/12/06, Bill Rugolsky Jr. <brugolsky at telemetry-investments.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 10:41:01AM -0400, Bill Rugolsky Jr. wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 09:30:13AM +0100, Dan Track wrote:
> > > Hi
> > >
> > > Does anybody know where bc stores its calucation while calculating a
> > > number. Basically I'm running 36000000^36000000.
> >
> > Rewriting it as (36^36000000) * (10 ^ 216000000)
> > will save calculating, storing, and printing the 216M zeros,
> > and will cut the first factor down to a "mere" 56M digits.
>
> Just for kicks, I did this on a 4GB dual Opteron 246 running x86_64 Rawhide.
> It took about 9 hours, and used about 200MB of VM (sorry, lost the output
> of "time"), but the end result is:
>
> (10656 ... <56026881 digits> ... 09376) * (10 ^ 216000000)
>
> I wonder how the various other packages supporting multiple precision
> (e.g., Pari) stack up.
>
> Regards,
>
>         Bill Rugolsky
>
Wow. Great thanks for that. The last part of your number does it mean
there are 216000000 zeros in the final figure, or is it 216000001
zeros?

Thanks
Dan