Please allow me to clarify what I had to say in my post earlier this morning. In their Mathematics Dictionary, under “IRRATIONAL”, James & James say: “irrational number. A real number not expressible as an integer or quotient of integers; a nonrational number.” I’m sure I learned that somewhere in the past, but when I saw all of Fortran’s spurious digits following the decimal point I got carried away, forgot the fundamentals, and tended to think Fortran was correct. I hope you many programmers, in whatever language, who have had that experience, will give me a nanograin of sympathy for having expressed my earlier post so poorly. Of course I learned (mainly through trial and error) that my real quotient was required to terminate by virtue of its very existence as a "quotient of integers". However, I must confess, I failed to see that initially. Sorry about that. Incidentally, I would be interested to see how other languages, like Python, Perl, etc., would handle this "Big Data" fraction. Regards, Bearcat
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Please allow me to clarify what I had to say in my post earlier this morning. In their Mathematics Dictionary, under “IRRATIONAL”, James & James say: “irrational number. A real number not expressible as an integer or quotient of integers; a nonrational number.” I’m sure I learned that somewhere in the past, but when I saw all of Fortran’s spurious digits following the decimal point I got carried away, forgot the fundamentals, and tended to think Fortran was correct. I hope you many programmers, in whatever language, who have had that experience, will give me a nanograin of sympathy for having expressed my earlier post so poorly. Of course I learned (mainly through trial and error) that my real quotient was required to terminate by virtue of its very existence as a "quotient of integers". However, I must confess, I failed to see that initially. Sorry about that. Incidentally, I would be interested to see how other languages, like Python, Perl, etc., would handle this "Big Data" fraction.
Regards, Bearcat