From: Ethan Price <nahteecirp@...>
Date: 2006-11-17T02:39:46+09:00
Subject: Bignum doesn't work.....?

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Forgive me if this has been answered, I have look all around and can't seem
to find an answer. I am trying to implement the Fermat primality test (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat_primality_test ) in Ruby. The problem is
everytime ruby does the a^(n-1) computation, it seems to stumble on numbers
like 1000 (so its doing a^999). I have set both a and n to fixnums, and
according to everything I have read, it should switch to bignum if the
result is too big. But it doesn't seem to do that, it just seems to spit out
infinity. Any ideas? I used the latest one click installer to install Ruby.

Ethan

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