Not only is mdillon's solution correct, it's also much more
efficient as each factorial is simply one multiply on the
previous one, whereas calling the function each time means a lot more
work is being done.
Now the reason for the failure is that the Math::NumberCruncher
function overflows for 171!. Unfortunately it returns '1.#INF' which
Perl happily treats as 1.0 in your division, so you simply divide by
one from that point on, not making much more progress.
Update: While Math::NumberCruncher
does not use BigFloats for it's factorial function, it does
already use the Math::BigFloat module
for storing its very large version of $PI (though strangely BigFloats are not used
in calculations with that $PI so it's probably pointless...), so it is a
trivial matter to patch Math::NumberCruncher
to use a BigFloat for the factorial. This is of course for occasional uses
as for an iterative use of factorial mdillon's answer is still
much faster.
--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser
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