Hacker News Reader

Comment by jansan | Hacker News Reader

The high precision calculator was a true gem. I have used it a few times when I needed more precision than the 64bit that Javascript gives me. Is there an alternative somewhere?

View on HN

Linux (and MacOS homebrew) offers the arbitrary precision calculator bc:

    > bc -l
    sqrt(2)
    1.41421356237309504880
    scale=64
    sqrt(2)
    1.4142135623730950488016887242096980785696718753769480731766797379

It doesn't have the same satisfaction of just writing down the numbers and operations on them, but "python3 -c 'import decimal; decimal.getcontext().prec=130; print(decimal.Decimal(2).sqrt())'" will give you any desired precision (130 here) and I imagine roughly the same gamut of mathematics operations as Javascript.

https://jrsinclair.com/articles/2020/sick-of-the-jokes-write...

Fabrice Bellard's numcalc.com is okay if you just want JavaScript with more precision.

I simply use calc in emacs, it has arbitrary precision (really bound by process memory limit on modern systems).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com