

How to count to a zillion without falling off the end of the number line - grogers
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.7300,y.2009,no.5,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx

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btilly
There is a solution to this problem which lets you have your cake and eat it
to. Continued fractions give you a representation of real numbers that turns
into a compact exact representation of all possible fractions. (If you've got
a lazy language, like Haskell, you can compactly represent many real numbers
as well.) Doing arithmetic with them is tricky, but possible.

If you're interested, <http://perl.plover.com/yak/cftalk/> has all of the
necessary details, including a sample implementation as a program in C.

I've never heard of anyone using that number system for serious work, but I'd
be curious how well that would work out.

