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Asked: 2026-05-16T22:03:54+00:00

As (hopefully) most of you know, floating point arithmetic is different from real number

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As (hopefully) most of you know, floating point arithmetic is different from real number arithmetic. It’s for starters imprecise. Many numbers, especially decimals (0.1, 0.3) cannot be represented, leading to problems like this. A more thorough list can be found here.

Are there any general purpose languages that have built-in support for something closer to real number arithmetic? If not, what are good libraries that support this?

EDIT: Arbitrary precision decimal
datatypes are not what I am looking
for. I want to be able to represent
numbers like 1/3, sqrt(3), or 1 + 2i as well.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    To cover the real numbers with any flair you’ll need a symbolic package.

    Boost, the C++ project, has a Rational library, but that’s only part of the story.

    You have irrational numbers in all sorts of forms (pi, base of the natural logarithm, square and cube roots, the Champernowne constant, to name only a few). The only way I know of to handle arithmetic operations is a symbolic package with smarts as to the relationship amongst all of these numbers. Assuming you could express e^pi, how would you add one to it? Or take the square root of it?

    Mathematica might handle these cases.

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