Re: The IDS, the EDS and the DBMS

Mikito Harakiri wrote:
>>But irrationals, or even the subset of them that is the nth roots of
>>integers, don't have such a canonical form - for example consider
>>sqrt(2) + sqrt(3). So after a few simple addition or multiplication
>>operations the representation will rapidly get very unwieldy.

> 
> When adding integers the representation grows as well, so there is really no
> difference.

Well if I add two integers the result is usually not much bigger in terms of space e.g.
28594564654655 + 56467986465464

but if I add two "surds" I get an expression that takes up at least twice as much space e.g. sqrt(2) + sqrt(3). Also there could be complicated ways to simplify the expressions which would be computationally expensive compared to integers.

Paul. Received on Tue Sep 14 2004 - 21:26:16 CEST