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Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:26:16 +0100
From: Paul <paul@test.com>
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Subject: Re: The IDS, the EDS and the DBMS
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Xref: dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu comp.databases.theory:25990

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.