speaking of open source being a friendly and helpful place, I can't help pointing this out and stating for the record how much we all still stand to learn from mark.
Re:digits of pi?
Smylers on 2005-09-28T07:08:02
Yes, it's the right thread — read the initial question, skim through the other responses on that page, and then go to the next page to read MJD's excellent response at number 11.
Smylers
Re:digits of pi?
fxn on 2005-09-28T13:17:37
Oh yes, I missed the page was the first one of a paginated thread. Thank you!
Re:the best part
n1vux on 2005-09-28T21:36:12
Yeah, if he really wants to work in packed decimal efficiently (BCD) he should be using Cobol.
(Don't laugh,$DayJob->employerstill hires Cobolistas, and Cobol2002 supports Unicode and XML.)The questioner could also get direct access to BCD with PL/1, the original Swiss Army Chainsaw, which brings us back to MJD.
The questioner couldn't see the forest for the trees BCD only saves him 50% memory compared to Tiny (byte) integers or array of chars. (Or Tiny costs only 100%.) Which in big-oh notation is
O(1)
otherwise known as "irrelevant". And he was talking about streaming anyway -- streaming in Perl is MJD's current metier, and they were discussing BCD! *sigh* Using streaming techniques to fill a PDL array of ints would be efficient enough with a big window and enough overlap.I shudder to think what use he'll put to the patterns he finds in Pi's digits. I hope it's not serious mathematics, I'd be embarrassed if so.
He started this project a week ago in PHP. He got the same answer there.
Using a Zip-type perl module to read a block of compressed PI file at a time, keeping a lenght($pattern) from previous block, would have been a fine solution, alas.
