[de6u99er]

Ways back we got a prnalty when we did not do our homework which was called "Zapfen" in German language.

It's basically like this: You get a starting number, have to multiply it with 2, then it's result with 3, then this result with 4, until you multiplied it with 9. After that you had to divide it by 2, then by 3, ... and finally by 9 and end up with the same number you started with. Sometimes even higher than 9.

Since our teachers understood that there are calculators and even kids like me who knew how to write loops in Basic code, they chose the numbers big enough to result in scientific format or overflows, so that at a certain step the precise calculation could not be done any more with a calculator or computer program.

So I wrote a Basic program which did multiplications and divisions the way you would do it manually with strings. From this point on I was only limited by the amount of memory, which wasn't an issue since my Amiga 500 had 1 MB of Ram.

[lynguist]

But that’s weird, as 9! is just 360,000, 6 digits in decimal.

Assuming a pocket calculator has 8 digits, it would overflow only if the starting number was around 300. Was it like that?

[dwringer]

I believe the answer is already in the comment to which you've replied:

> they chose the numbers big enough to result in [...] overflows