Number Bug

[dunbarx]

Richmond.

SANE was "Standard Apple Numeric Environment" and was replaced decades ago. What is running today, however, still has the same limitation.

There are websites that will do that sort of math for you. They prove that HC or LC fails after digit 17 or so.

Craig

[SparkOut]

LiveCode uses 64-bit IEEE 754 floating-point representation for numbers. This provides around 16 digits of decimal precision [...]
The precision of the calculation [...] is exactly as defined by the LiveCode language specification and the IEEE 754 standard.

This is more a historical limitation defined by "computer scientists" and "standards" than a failing of LiveCode programmers to implement mathematics properly. While it would be good to have native bigNum arithmetic in the engine, to have all calculations use arbitrarily large digits would be a vast loss in the trade-off between precision and efficiency.
You don't usually need such as 1.0000000000 + 1.0000000000 = 2.0000000000
If you do need that precision, there are ways to use it.

[dunbarx]

What Sparkout said.

If you are an astronaut trying to find your way around, see the above post about galaxies. If you want to design very closely fit machine parts, know that 16 digits will give you accuracy to about the width of a proton.

The limit is not a, er, limit to practical use. For number munchers, we have Hermann's gadgetry.

Craig