On Mon, 24 Mar 2014 19:30:39 -0700, Warren Henning 

<[log in to unmask]> wrote:



>will Java's built-in BigDecimal class suffice, or do you need something

>more specialized?

>



BigDecimal and BigInteger look like they would provide some rudimentary 

support. Oracle's documentation doesn't show too much in the way of 

functionality for typical experimental math support.  Compare ARPREC 

(http://crd-legacy.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/mpdist/) for example, from Bailey's page, 

which uses the Fourier transform for digits > 1000, PSLQ, etc. So, it's not just 

a matter of support for big numbers but performance tradeoffs and best 

practices.



Anyway, without a Java library like ARPREC maybe I'll need to start with 

BigDecimal and BigInteger and add on the other tools I need as well as 

tweeking where needed. Maybe I could rely on GP to do the evaluation and use 

BigDecimal and BigInteger as primitives. It should even be cleaner that way.



Thanks Warren for pointing out BigDecimal.