LogFAQs > #932192582

AlisLandale posted...

Any comp-sci majors in here?

If the question is "the largest number you could possibly display fully", someone could calculate the biggest possible number one could store, in plain-text, on a hard drive.

And then scale that up to whatever the current, largest computer hard-drive is in terms of data storage.

And then we have the (currently) largest "quantifiable" number.

You can do better than that. Way better. Text is an awful way to store a number. If you let it be floating point and make the mantissa 0 length (which is legit, btw), you can get up to 2^(about half a quadrillion).

If you really want to get crazy, you can define your own formats. For example, you could define one byte for a base, one byte for an n and every other for a floating-point number of up arrows:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation

Heh.

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53 LIII 0b110101
p16 0x35