--- Todd Benson <toddkennethbenson / yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> --- Victor Reyes <victor.reyes / gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Todd, thank you for the example. I truly
> appreciate
> > it. I'll give it a try.
> 
> Don't get too excited.  On my system (2.4GHz Intel),
> it looks like it would take about 2.5 hours to
> compute

# The next 3 lines compute 2**32582656 in less than a
minute on my system:


a = 2 ** (2**10 * 9)
b = 1
3541.times { b*=a }
# a**3541, which equals 2**32582656, will fail to
# execute in ruby, but the 3541.times works


# this next line, however,

s = b.to_s

# takes a _very_ long time
# similar (but much longer, I think) to Python's
# rendering of b into a string.

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