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I am sure this has been discussed before, but for some reason when I am calculating high numbers using exponents, it will suddenly give me an incorrect answer first going to negative, then 0.

Here is the number that gave me trouble:

30^9

Which gave a result of -834666496, which is clearly wrong.

I stumbled on it while experimenting with the taylor maclaurin polynomial for sin, curious to see if I could make a function that could calculate sin. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be feasible if I can't find a workaround for this glitch.

Anyone know anything about this?

[edit]
after some experimenting, I found that DBC has a problem handling VERY big numbers (specifically 10 billion and greater).

Try it:


Is there a way around this (besides dividing everything by 1 billion and keeping up with it later)?

LOL... this is probably that you're hitting the limits of that datatype. I THINK you're hitting the bit limit - and the jump from negative to positive is likely the sign bit (used in integers but not CPU native "unsigned" numbers) getting switched as you roll out of range..

You actually already decribed a decent solution... and this problem is not limited to DBPro. I have read about and seen source for more than one library of code designed specifically to make "custom data types" for numbers where they "chain" multiple integers together to serve as some super number datatype .. and they (authors of such API's) usually write routines to perform basic math on these large "homebrew" number data types.. and usually provide routines to convert strings to thiese data type values and back to make them usuable. Such a strategy in DBPro/DBC/etc.. would probably have to be homegrown however.

--Jason

@BN2

Take a look at :

DBC Largest Numbers

It may have some helpful information.