Good to about 45 places; spigot algorithm

The output of the obfuscated code seems to be good for about 45 places (at least on my box running Perl v5.8.3 built for i386-linux-thread-multi) before it differs from the reference values from the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

If you want more precision, you might be interested in Unbounded Spigot Algorithms for the Digits of π by Jeremy Gibbons. It's a fun read, and you can adapt the methods presented in his paper to computing e digit by digit.

Comment on Good to about 45 places; spigot algorithm

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Re: Good to about 45 places; spigot algorithm by jdalbec (Deacon) on Jul 22, 2004 at 03:06 UTC
The inaccuracy appears to be the result of roundoff error; `use bigint;` or `use Math::BigInt ':constant';` (as suggested by tachyon and bageler) fixes that also. Also, my algorithm is streaming in Gibbons' sense. It represents the continued fraction as a composition of linear fractional transformations.	[reply] [d/l] [select]