Is there an upper bound to BigInteger

Question

Possible Duplicate    What does BigInteger having no limit mean        The Javadoc for BigInteger does not define any maximum or minimum   However  it does say    emphasis added      Immutable arbitrary-precision integers   Is there such a maximum  even in theory   Or is the way BigInteger operates fundamentally different  such that there is in reality no maximum except for the amount of memory available on the computer

User · Accepted Answer

The number is held in an int   - the maximum size of an array is Integer MAX VALUE  So the maximum BigInteger probably is  2   32    Integer MAX VALUE  Admittedly  this is implementation dependent  not part of the specification   In Java 8  some information was added to the BigInteger javadoc  giving a minimum supported range and the actual limit of the current implementation   BigInteger must support values in the range -2Integer MAX VALUE  exclusive  to  2Integer MAX VALUE  exclusive  and may support values outside of that range  Implementation note  BigInteger constructors and operations throw ArithmeticException when the result is out of the supported range of -2Integer MAX VALUE  exclusive  to  2Integer MAX VALUE  exclusive

User · Answer

BigInteger would only be used if you know it will not be a decimal and   there is a possibility of the long data type not being large enough    BigInteger has no cap on its max size  as large as the RAM on the   computer can hold     From here   It is implemented using an int       110             111          The magnitude of this BigInteger  in  lt i gt big-endian lt  i gt  order  the   112          zeroth element of this array is the most-significant int of the   113          magnitude   The magnitude must be  minimal  in that the most-significant   114          int    code mag 0    must be non-zero   This is necessary to   115          ensure that there is exactly one representation for each BigInteger   116          value   Note that this implies that the BigInteger zero has a   117          zero-length mag array    118             119       final int   mag    From the source  From the Wikipedia article Arbitrary-precision arithmetic      Several modern programming languages have built-in support for   bignums  and others have libraries available for arbitrary-precision   integer and floating-point math  Rather than store values as a fixed   number of binary bits related to the size of the processor register    these implementations typically use variable-length arrays of digits

User · Answer

The first maximum you would hit is the length of a String which is 231-1 digits   It s much smaller than the maximum of a BigInteger but IMHO it loses much of its value if it can t be printed

[java] Is there an upper bound to BigInteger?

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