From: Adam Shelly <adam.shelly@...>
Date: 2006-02-03T04:31:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Work around for "Bignum out of Float range"?

On 2/2/06, Sam Kong <sam.s.kong@gmail.com> wrote:
> If I want to get the result, how can I work around the barrier?

here's some hacky code which returns a 2-element array
the first number is the significant digits and the second number is
the exponent:

def calc(n)
  exp=0
  val = (2 ** n)
  while val*3 > 1e290.to_i
    val/=10
    exp+=1
  end
  val *=(5**0.5)
  unless val.to_s.grep(/(.*)e\+(.*)/).empty?
    val = $1.to_f
    exp+=$2.to_i
  end
  [val, exp]
end

p calc 1
p calc 10
p calc 100
p calc 1000
p calc 10000

[4.47213595499958, 0]
[2289.73360895978, 0]
[2.83455291382873, 30]
[2.39596608414461, 301]
[4.46109674874798, 3010]

-Adam