What are the disadvantages of learning mathematics?

Answer 1

There are many considerations. The scratchpad variable d must be able to hold the result of a single-digit multiply plus the carry from the prior digit's multiply. In base ten, a sixteen-bit integer is certainly adequate as it allows up to 32767. However, this example cheats, in that the value of n is not itself limited to a single digit. This has the consequence that the method will fail for n > 3200 or so. In a more general implementation, n would also use a multi-digit representation. A second consequence of the shortcut is that after the multi-digit multiply has been completed, the last value of carry may need to be carried into multiple higher-order digits, not just one. There is also the issue of printing the result in base ten, for human consideration. Because the base is already ten, the result could be shown simply by printing the successive digits of array digit, but they would appear with the highest-order digit last (so that 123 would appear as "321"). The whole array could be printed in reverse order, but that would present the number with leading zeroes ("00000...000123") which may not be appreciated, so this implementation builds the representation in a space-padded text variable and then prints that. The first few results (with spacing every fifth digit and annotation added here) are: This implementation could make more effective use of the computer's built in arithmetic. A simple escalation would be to use base 100 (with corresponding changes to the translation process for output), or, with sufficiently wide computer variables (such as 32-bit integers) we could use larger bases, such as 10,000. Working in a power-of-2 base closer to the computer's built-in integer operations offers advantages, although conversion to a decimal base for output becomes more difficult