Hi Geoff,

LiveCode will do calculations reliably on numbers that are no larger than 15 digits, i.e. at most 999999999999999.

If you do a calculation like
1111111111111111111111111*2
--> 2222222222222222200000000
it is easy to see that the result is incorrect.

See page 34 of my book.

Perhaps you should add some comments to your script.

--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

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On 9/6/2013 00:54, Geoff Canyon wrote:
I've written bignum routines for addition and multiplication several times
when solving project euler problems. Generally my multiplication functions
bog down at about 200 digits -- i.e. take more than a second to run.

I decided to optimize, and about a dozen iterations later, the below is the
result. It will multiply two 5,000-digit numbers in about a second on my
machine, and even 20,000 digit multiplication seems to work in about 15
seconds or so (woot!).

Here's the weird part. I would have said that LC numbers are 32 bit, and
lose their minds at about 2 billion. The temp variable S in this function
gets large, and I wrote many lines of code working around that. Then I ran
some tests, and seemingly when multiplying a string of 20,0000 nines --
99999999...999999 -- even though S gets up to 499,949,990,000, all is well,
and the result is correct. I wonder how large S can get before it
overflows? I did some quick experiments without hitting a conclusive
answer, and I don't see it in the docs or online.

In the meantime, multiply really big integers here:

function bigTimes X,Y
    if char 1 of X is "-" then
       put "-" into leadChar
       delete char 1 of X
    end if
    if char 1 of Y is "-"  then
       if leadChar is "-" then put empty into leadChar else put "-" into
leadChar
       delete char 1 of Y
    end if
    put (3 + length(X)) div 4 * 4 into XL
    put char 1 to XL - length(X) of "000" before X
    put (3 + length(Y)) div 4 * 4 into YL
    put char 1 to YL - length(y) of "000" before y
    repeat with N = XL + YL down to 9 step -4
       repeat with M = max(4,N - YL) to min(XL,N - 4) step 4
          add (char M - 3 to M of X) * (char N - M - 3 to N - M of Y) to S
       end repeat
       put char -4 to -1 of S before R
       delete char -4 to -1 of S
    end repeat
    if S is 0 then put empty into S
    return leadChar & S & R
end bigTimes
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