Dave Horsfall: John Cowan: High-precision approximation to sqrt(2). What's the trick? ====== Not really a trick, just a hoary old zero-order CPU benchmark: echo 99k2vp | time dc You can see why letting people type that on a Convex thinking it was a Sun 3/50 might have entertainment value. Modern systems are far too fast for that to be worth while, though. I still use a variant of it: a shell script called dc-N, containing dc <<! 99k[2vszla1-dsa0<b]sb${1-500}salbx ! meant to be invoked as time dc-N 10000 or the like. (The internal default of 500 has long since gone stale too, of course.) Norman Wilson Toronto ON