[seqfan] Re: OEIS Wiki and the Current 80 decimal digit limitation

[Charles Greathouse]

> reason it couldn't be included in a b-file though - as far as I remember
> b-files don't have the digit limit, and can happily be 1MB or bigger.

"Each pair n, a(n) should be on a single line, even if a(n) is very large.
But a(n) should not have more than about 1000 digits, or some of the
programs will fail."
http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/SubmitB.html

Charles Greathouse
Analyst/Programmer
Case Western Reserve University

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 5:07 AM,  <hv at crypt.org> wrote:
> Andrew Weimholt <andrew.weimholt at gmail.com> wrote:
> :Once the OEIS moves to the Wiki, will we do away with the current
> :limit of 80 decimal digits?
>
> The WP style guide on article size [1] is worth reading.
>
> If the OEIS wiki uses similar guidelines, your "(p+1)|a(n) -> p|a(n+1)"
> sequence could happily include the 11K-digit a(34), but probably should not
> include the (presumably much larger) a(68), at least directly. I see no
> reason it couldn't be included in a b-file though - as far as I remember
> b-files don't have the digit limit, and can happily be 1MB or bigger.
>
> Other than page-size considerations, the only reason I can see to retain
> a limit on numbers in the OEIS is for compatibility with existing code:
> for example, if the other current discussion decides to try to maintain
> the old search code, that might impose restrictions on the maximum length
> of numbers.
>
> For sequences such as yours, an additional consideration is readability -
> including the 11K string in the middle of a sequence of much smaller numbers
> is unlikely to be the ideal way for someone to view the sequence, so we may
> want to introduce a convention of wrapping such things in a template that
> could (say) show them inline as "18034...25273 (11736 digits)", with a link
> to see the whole number (as a popup, or on a separate page).
>
> I can also imagine that, where the factorization of very large numbers is
> known, it would be useful to include a standard way to see that too, to save
> readers having to factorize them for themselves. That would particularly be
> the case for a sequence such as this, where the factorization is precisely
> what drives subsequent values.
>
> Hugo
>
> [1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_size>
>
>
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