Um, not if you're going to try and turn them into numbers first. But if you store them as ['sqrt 5] or some similar operator/operand pair, then you can manipulate them symbolically and wait for them to cancel out, instead of evaluating them. This requires implementing some kind of symbolic-algebra system, but it's certainly possible: when I was in college my TI-89 could compute the closed form for arbitrarily large N without losing precision (or accuracy).
On Oct 13, 2:02 pm, Jarl Haggerty <fictivela...@gmail.com> wrote: > A slight tangent, is there anyway to represent exact square roots? > I'd like to have an exact closed form fibonacci function. > > On Oct 13, 1:28 pm, David Sletten <da...@bosatsu.net> wrote: > > > On Oct 12, 2010, at 5:44 PM, Brian Hurt wrote: > > > > For example, in base 10, 1/3 * 3 = 0.99999... > > > It may seem counterintuitive, but that statement is perfectly true. > > 1 = 0.9999... > > > That's a good test of how well you understand infinity. > > > Of course, the problem arises when we truncate the string of 9's, which we > > must invariably do in a computer-based representation. > > > Have all good days, > > David Sletten > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
