Loss of Precision and For Loops

My program has to preform a task an N-factorial number of times. Besides the obvious problems involving computational time, I was wondering how the loss of precision of very large numbers affected the number of times that my program went through the loop. If I have a number like 25 factorial, it doesn't have accuracy down to the ones place. So if I needed my program to run through a process 25! times, would it actually attempt to do it 25!, or would it round off somewhere?

So if I wrote

for i = 1 : factorial ( 25 )

would the loop run through 25! times or would it round down to another number?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

It would round it off.

... You do realize that it would require approximately half a billion years if you were able to operate at 1 billion iterations per second ????

[Juan]

Yeah, I eventually sat down to do the math and I saw it was unfeasible. I kinda figured out that the time would be ridiculous, although I never thought it would be in the order of a billion years. I was just curious about rounding though.

Thanks!