mdg@ariel.UUCP (M.GALE) (11/08/84)
QUESTION: Where do we find out how to access some thing bigger then a real or double >> 10**40? We both learned .FOR on DEC-10 and VAX/VMS and got spoiled by documentation. My wife is a Nuclear Engineering student whose programs won't run under unix(SYS V), the errors are floating point overflow- she has variables hit magnitudes of 10**250! We borrowed a friends ibm pc compatible and Digital Research's Fortran-77 compiler and the program ran(and ran and ran-almost 2 hours). The catalog from AT&T Customer Information Center didn't provide much help. We're under Sys V on a VAX-780. I don't normally read net.lang so please email. I'll honor requests to summerize if there are any. Thanx, mdgale ihnp4!ariel!mdg holmdel, nj (201) 834-4535 *At least every other line contains a trademark of somebody- you know who you are. * "This is really state of the art gee whiz"
cdl@mplvax.UUCP (Carl Lowenstein) (11/09/84)
You could always get a PDP-8, with its 2^(2^11) ~ 10^600 floating-point range. If you could find the floating-point hardware processor that went with it, you would really have a pretty good system. -- carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego {ihnp4|decvax|akgua|dcdwest|ucbvax} !sdcsvax!mplvax!cdl