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by dqv 1039 days ago
I did a little googol and found out it's like an accelerated math thing https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/American_Invi...
2 comments
vinaypai 1039 days ago
Okay, I was just wondering if there's something non-obvious here. I guess OP is just woefully misguided about languages other than scheme or "these languages can't handle it" means something more like "I don't know how to use those languages".
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mlyle 1038 days ago
Decent complex types and library calls to do exponentiation, etc, don't always come for free in any given language environment. It's nice that it "just works" in many scheme environments (but this is not the only language runtime where this is true and it's not something that you can't work around).
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vinaypai 1038 days ago
The example the OP cited doesn't involve complex numbers. Atan(1) is pi/4.
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mlyle 1038 days ago
Sigh.

1i is an imaginary number. We are discussing the difficulty in calculating i^i, not whether a language can do atan(1).

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mlyle 1038 days ago
To be clear, it's a competitive exam and one of the primary feeders into the USA Math Olympiad team.

Many problems are quite challenging.

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dxbydt 1038 days ago
yeah it looks like everybody's focused on the mechanics of the computation and not appreciating the math i.e. why the two expressions compute to the same value.
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mlyle 1038 days ago
We are not in an algebra II class. We are talking about the merits of scheme. You posted a relatively opaque comment and made a relatively unfounded assertion about whether other languages could do it.

It might have been better for you to have been a little more direct-- "I like that exponentiation of complex types just works in Scheme; I don't think that works in other languages!"

I'm not sure why you think scheme is unique in being able to do this-- indeed, it's one of the examples of std::pow on cppreference:

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/numeric/complex/pow

> std::cout << "i^i = " << std::pow(i, i) << '\n';

> i^i = (0.207880,0.000000)

I also hope it wasn't a way to humblebrag that you have a kid in middle school that knows math that lots of other people around here don't (having forgotten it from alg2/precalc or just having trouble reading your comment). Know your audience and prevailing context, and be clear.

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