25 Mar
2012
25 Mar
'12
7:14 a.m.
Jim,
(Fractint bug alert: if the value of the imag(p1) parameter is entered in the parameter file as 1000000000000000 , the program reads the value as -1530494976 Changing the parameter file entry to 1000000000000000.0 [adding a decimal point and a zero] cures the problem. Something else is being picked up, but I cannot see what.)
The value 1000000000000000 (1e+15) requires 7 bytes to be represented as an integer. The long integer type (the biggest we have available) only has 4 bytes, so the top three bytes are dropped. The value -1530494976 is what is left in the lower four bytes. The range of integers that can be used are -2,147,483,648 to +2,147,483,647. Jonathan