Mation

Many thanks for your reply. Sorry my OP was short on detail. Of the solutions you suggest, I think I definitely need to look at Mathematica, and also a 'custom real number implementation' (I didn't know these existed, so that's a big help). I'm working with real numbers. I'm too shy on this thread to say what the simulation is of as I'm supremely underqualified to do it and it'll take more explanation than I want this thread to be for (I will however stick it all - the idea - on here at some point for criticism and ideas - I just need to work up to it!) The numbers I'm generating at times exceed Matlab's realmin (2.2251e-308) and realmax (1.7977e+308). The simulation requires this - can't get round it in that sense. If I store the numbers as factors how would I then work on the product? Meaning, if I have two huge numbers, both of which are stored as a number of products, what sort of thing do I need to do to unambiguously store the result of an operation that involves both of them? (Again apologies if I'm missing obvious answers).

Hi Apologies if this is a daft question (it probably is). I've searched and haven't found an answer... I'm trying to run a simulation that I've programmed in Matlab. It generates very large and small numbers that can't be represented and so get stored as +/-Inf and further operations on these then become NaN. I can't think of any way to get round this. Is there any way of representing these numbers that would mean I could work on them (on computer), however convoluted? Any help gratefully received, especially if explained as if to a small child

Bravo! You are very entertaining Good point. Don't overstate your case, pyxxo. You ask some really good questions, so it would be a shame if people got distracted by (correctly) rebutting details that aren't integral if the concept is sound.