On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, Brian Hurt wrote:

> I comment that simply exactly *representing* a number of the form 
> 2^4000000000 takes like 476.8 megabytes.

It could take 500 megabytes or about 476.8 mebibytes:

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

But representation of 2^4000000000 using "2^4000000000" only requires 12 
bytes, a considerable savings!

Mike