Re^4: Irrational numbers

[BrowserUk]

You are competing against something that the hardware can do in as little as one cpu cycle.

It is actually much worse than that these days. Most physical simulation games lend themselves very nicely to being programmed for GPUs, in which case he would be competing with not just 1 FP calc per cycle, but dozens or even hundreds of FP multiply-add calculations per cycle.

And a single call to his closure-based lazy irrationals would take hundreds of cycles per digit.

Even if he dropped into C and avoided Perl's sub call overheads; calculating each digit using a polynomial -- Taylor series or similar -- will still take dozens of cycles.

We are talking 2 or 3 (even 4!) orders of magnitude slower calculations in order to achieve accuracy that simply isn't required.