Hello spud480,
You didn't specify what kind of system you are using, so I'll provide
suggestions for both Windows and Unix (Linux) systems.
If you have a Unix system, try
man dc
to see if you have the "arbitrary precision calculator". It can read
commands from files or standard input. Results are normally sent to
standard output. You can specify integer arithmetic or arbitrary
precision. Values and macros can be stored and retrieved from
registers. It also allows for conditional execution of macros stored
in registers.
Taking standard output and separating into small pieces can be done
with other shell utilities such as sed, awk and others. Let's say you
take one of the long numbers into a series of three digit lines...
324
568
429
By numbering the lines to read like...
001 324
002 568
003 429
you can then do searches (using grep), sorts (using sort), counting
unique items (using uniq) and similar manipulations with shell
utilities. I can suggest some techniques for doing this if you are not
familiar with them.
On Windows (or Unix), there is a multiple precision arithmethic
package named MAPM, available at...
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~ringx004/mapm-main.html
There are a number of applications built upon MAPM including a desk
calculator similar to dc, plus since you get source code you can build
an application to do whatever you need. As another has suggested, you
can use other windows programs to do searches as well.
There are also some languages that implement what are called a
"bignum" (arbitrary precision arithmetic). One of the more recent ones
is Ruby, described at:
http://www.rubycentral.com/
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ref_c_bignum.html
Which has a pretty comprehensive description of the language and from
where you can get Ruby versions for Windows or Unix systems.
These are a few sources of this kind of software. Additional searches
using phrases such as "arbitrary precision arithmetic", "bignum",
"repeated sequences of numbers" and so on can provide additional
sources.
--Maniac |
Clarification of Answer by
maniac-ga
on
11 Aug 2002 20:44 PDT
Hello spud480,
From your request for clarification, you might not get an acceptable
answer without a lot of effort on your part. I assumed you had some
experience in using computer systems and preferrably some experience
in writing computer programs (and using computer languages).
From your problem description, there are no "easy answers" without
spending a lot of money; a license for an application such as
Matlab...
http://www.mathworks.com/
costs about $2000. If you don't want to spend that kind of money, I
will try again with more focus on the Windows solution (if you have a
Unix or Linux system - let me know and I can answer more on that as
well) and walk through the process. Using MAPM as an example from...
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~ringx004/mapm-main.html
Select that site with your web browser. Near the end of the page is a
link titled "Download the DOS / Win NT/9x distribution : mapm-44.zip"
Or select http://www.tc.umn.edu/~ringx004/mapm-44.zip to download a
copy of MAPM. When the contents of the zip file is extracted, you get
a directory with the source code of the MAPM library and applications.
The file README.DOS describes how to build the library and application
on a windows machine (instructions vary by which C compiler you have
available). Another file named README is also in that directory which
provides some guidance in using the programs and cautions on accuracy.
Once the preceeding was completed, you can use the desk calculator
program to generate the values you are looking for. I would suggest
using a "DOS window" to run the desk calculator, do the calculations
you want and capture the output directly to a file or cut / paste into
the notepad or MS Word. That gives you the raw data that you can cut
into pieces, do searches (e.g., Find command), import into a
spreadsheet for counting, sorting, or plotting.
This is not going to be a fancy solution to your problem - you might
have to write some of your own software to do this task because you
are asking for something quite unusual. There are not any prebuilt
application that do this kind of work unless you are willing to spend
a LOT of money. I mentioned the price of Matlab above - that is pretty
typical for a comprehensive mathematics analysis package.
--Maniac
|
