Hi!
        I'm in high school and I recently competed in a national 
(In Australia) programming competition through my school. I got 4 of the 5
questions done (in the 2 hours). But one of the questions involved reciprocal
numbers. You had to write a program to locate the numbers between 101 and 999
for which the reciprocal contains the digit set 1996 and determine the position
at which the set begins. The question also stated that the program should be
able to handle numbers to 500 decimal places.
        There was a similar question the year before so I was ready for it
(although that question was alot harder). I decided to use borland's function
to convert a floating point number to a string and to find the digit set from
there but for some reason borland only converted at most 20 decimal places =(

                Does anyone know of this limitation?????

         Is there any mathematical way to work this problem out?

I have supplied my proggie to show you what I have done. Please do not laugh
too hard as I was under pressure of a comp and I'm only a kid! =)

--------------------------->8-----------------------------------------------

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

main()
{
        int number;
        long double actualnumber;
        char string[1024];
        int decimalplaces=100;
        int dec,sign;
        int place;


        printf("Problem No 5 - RECIPROCAL SEQUENCE\n\n");
        printf("Barker College\nHornsby\n2077\n\n\n");
        printf("Senior Team:\n\n");
        printf("Peter Leschev                21 AUG 1979\n");
        printf("Julian Moorehouse            13 JAN 1979\n");
        printf("Chris Sherlock		      7 APR 1979\n");
        printf("\n\n");

        printf("Please note: Due to Borland's limitations in their
ecvt function which converts floating point numbers to strings, only approx
20 decimal places were converted to a string and thus our program was
limited to that many decimal places.\n\n\n"

        for(number=101;number<=999;number++)
        {
                actualnumber=(long double)1/(long double)number;

                strcpy(string,ecvt(actualnumber,decimalplaces,&dec,&sign));

                for(place=0;place<=90;place++)
                {
                        if(string[place]=='1' &&
string[place+1]=='9' && string[place+2]=='9' &&
string[place+3]=='6')
                        {
                                printf("The reciprocal of %d contains
1996 beginning at position %d",number,place+dec+5);
                        }
                }
        }

        return;
}

---------------------------------------------------->8------------------------

Can anyone help?

CYA!


... A feature is a bug with seniority.
--- FMail/386 1.02+