On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 19:05:12 -0400, Gregory Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure how gmp and the others represent their data but my first guess is
> that there's no particular reason the base of the mantissa and exponent have
> to be the same as the base the exponent is interpreted as. That is, you can
> store a base 10 exponent but store it and the mantissa in two's complement
> integers.
You can also store numbers as a relatively prime numerator and denominator,
which will let store rational numbers exactly. Doing this isn't going to help
with speed of operations though.