On 09/07/2006, at 8:17 PM, Tom Rauchenwald wrote:

> "Tim Hollingsworth" <timhollingsworth / gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Hello
>>
>> First post here, by the way.  Greetings to all:) New to ruby, love  
>> it, slaps
>> on backs all round.
>>
>> While I haven't solved the pangram problem, I did find what  
>> appears to be a
>> bug in Numeric.divmod on large numbers, as can be seen when using
>> Bignum.modulo:
>>
>> irb(main):017:0> 1e22 % 1e21
>> => 0.0
>> irb(main):018:0> 1e23 % 1e22
>> => 9.99999999999999e+021
>>
>> whoops!
>
> Not quite. 1e23 is a float, that's why you run into precision
> problems. This has been discussed here not long ago.
> If you use Bignums it works as expected:
>
> ,----
> | irb(main):001:0> 1e23.class
> | => Float
> | irb(main):002:0> (10**23).class
> | => Bignum
> | irb(main):003:0> 10**23 % 10**22
> | => 0
> `----
>
> Tom
>

aha right you are!  I was using to_i in my code, and there lies my  
problem.