[Edward Loper] > ... > - I do believe that there will be use cases for exponents outside > this range. Just because there's no physical quantities that are > reasonably measured with these numbers, doesn't mean that there > won't be abstract quantities that are reasonably measured with > huge numbers. You don't have a real use case, Edward (if you did, you would have given it by now <wink>). YAGNI. Note that GNU GMP's arbitrary-precision float types also have bounds on exponent magnitude (but not on precision) -- this is conventional. > - I don't believe that signaling an error when a number goes > outside this range will help catch any errors. What type of > error are we expecting to catch here? Overflow, and possibly underflow. Typical when a correct iterative algorithm is fed an input outside its radius of convergence, or an incorrect iterative algorithm is fed anything. > If this is such a problem, then why doesn't long also have > a max/min? For the same reason Decimal doesn't have a bound on precision: exact calculations can require any number of digits. Exponents kick in when the calculation becomes approximate (when precision is exceeded).
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