Re: infinities reformulated

[Aubrey Jaffer <agj@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 | Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 15:16:37 +0800
 | From: "Chongkai Zhu" <mathematica@xxxxxxxxx>
 | 
 | I mentioned Mathematica, only for the "inexact number" part of it,
 | not the "symbolic manipluation" part of it. For example, if you
 | want to save the square root of 2 as an inexact number, you can
 | write:
 | 
 | v1=1.414
 | 
 | the precision or the inexact number v1 is 4 (decimal digits);
 | 
 | but you can also write
 | 
 | v2=1.414213562373095048801688724209698078569671875376948073176679737990732478462107038850387534327641573
 | 
 | and v2 will get precision 100 (all these digits are saved into memory).

So in a Scheme implementation which has "arbitrarily big" precision,
how many digits is (sqrt 2)?  How many digits is (sin 7/5)?