Re: LOGO-L> Infinity and like words

[Chuck Shavit <CShavit@MagicSquare.com>]

At 04:34 PM 7/19/97 BST-1, Mike Doyle wrote:
>Brian
>
>I picked up you comment on using 'infinite precision' representation of 
>numbers. We sometimes get a little careless in our use of words and this 
>can lead to conceptual problems. As any real computer is a finite machine 
>the concept of infinity is incompatible with it. 


It is certainly true that computers cannot accurately represent infinite
irrational numbers such as PI.  In fact, no finite medium can.  However,
there are programming languages that can represent rational numbers with
arbitrary precision.  For example, if A=2 and B=3, then when you assign C
<= A/B, the result will be stored as the quotient of two integers, and thus
the infinite decimal number 0.666... is in fact represented accurately. 

Chuck Shavit

---------------------------------------------------------------
Please post messages to the Logo forum to logo-l@gsn.org.  Mail
questions about the list administration to logofdn@gsn.org.  To
unsubscribe send    unsubscribe logo-l    to majordomo@gsn.org.