Implementing Basic Arithmetic for Large Integers: Introduction

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Implementing Basic Arithmetic for Large Integers: Introduction

Nitin Verma

June 18, 2021

The computer hardware provides facility to store numbers and do some basic arithmetic operations on them like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. But generally this facility is limited to numbers in a certain range; for example on some computers, integers only up to 2⁶⁴ − 1 can be stored and operated upon. If we need to handle any arbitrarily large integers, we have to implement it in a program above this hardware.

In this series of three articles, we will learn how to implement large integers along with operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. This article provides introduction and implements addition, subtraction and some common internal methods. The two subsequent articles will be covering multiplication and division.

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