note martin <p> [http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/jeremy.gibbons/publications/spigot.pdf|This article] has a couple of variations of the algorithm with example code in Haskell. </p> <p> As the author points out, representation change algorithms like these are showcase examples for lazy evaluation. This in turn makes Perl 6 a very good language to implement them, besides Haskell. </p> <p> With the techniques explained in the article you can replace the large fixed-size array <tt>@a</tt> for the state by two FatRats or four Integers and actually return an infinite series of decimal digits (limited only by memory resources as the state numbers grow). </p> <p> These algorithms are not particularly fast, but not half bad either. Perfect, if you want to incrementally increase precision as you need it. In fact, they could be used in a framework for arbitrarily precise real arithmetic. I would love Perl 6 to support high precision math beyond rational arithmetic. </p> 992580 992590