Python can handle Very Large Numbers

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vegaseat vegaseat is offline Offline Aug 1st, 2005, 9:57 am |
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Scientists and deficit spenders like to use Python because it can handle very large numbers. I decided to give it a test with factorials. Factorials reach astronomical levels rather quickly. In case you can't quite remember, the factorial of 12 is !12 = 1*2*3*4*5*6*7*8*9*10*11*12 = 479001600, that is 479 million and some change! After that languages like C++ start to fizzle quickly! At !16 we get past the nations debt. Python can handle that and more! I stopped at !69 only because the display started to wrap the line. The result has 98 digits in it, I thought I made my point anyway.
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  1. # check the numeric range of Python with huge factorials
  2. # factorial(69) still checks out accurately! Has 98 digits in it!
  3. # 171122452428141311372468338881272839092270544893520369393648040923257279754140647424000000000000000
  4. # tested with Python24      vegaseat    01aug2005
  5.  
  6. def getFactorial(n):
  7.     """returns the factorial of n"""
  8.     if n == 0:
  9.         return 1
  10.     else:
  11.         k = n * getFactorial(n-1)
  12.         return k
  13.  
  14. for k in range(1, 70):
  15.     print "factorial of", k,"=", getFactorial(k)

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