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.