How to estimate fractional exponents using only addition, subtraction, multiplication and division? My question is related to Calculating logs and fractional exponents by hand, but despite that question's title, all answers there focus on logarithms. I am interested in fractional exponents alone.
The programming language I am working with doesn't support floating-point numbers (i.e. fractional numbers). To work around this, I am emulating fractions via fixed-point representation with 18 decimals (the language can go as high as $2^{256} - 1$). For example, I would write $\pi$ as $3141592653589793238$.
I need to calculate the exponential function when the exponent is a fractional number, but I can only use:

*

*Basic arithmetic operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division (note: division rounds down, no fractional part allowed)

*The exponentiation function (**) but only if the exponent is a whole number

The language doesn't support roots or other advanced functions natively.
Is there any mathematical trick that I can use to accurately estimate fractional exponents?
 A: You can handle the exponents as
$$x^{p/q}=\sqrt[q]{x^p}.$$
The powers $x^p$ aren't so problematic, though for large values you may have to truncate and use a form of floating-point. So your question amounts to taking $q^{\text{th}}$ roots. Several approaches are possible:

*

*solve $y^q=x^p$ by dichotomic search. You'll need to compute the $q^{\text{th}}$ powers of several $y$ candidates. For the starting bracketing of $y$, you can try successive doublings ($y=1,y=2,y=4,\cdots$) until $y^q$ exceeds $x^p$.


*solve $y^q=x^p$ by Newton's iterations,
$$y_{n+1}=\frac{(q-1)y_n^q+x^p}{qy_n^{q-1}}.$$

*

*use the old decimal method where you start with the $q$ leftmost digits, find the $q^{\text{th}}$ root of that number (by trial and error), then append the next digit and find the new $q^{\text{th}}$ root... You will need the expansion

$$(10m+d)^q=\sum_{k=0}^q\binom qk10^km^kd^{q-k}.$$
Alternatively, write the fraction in binary, $$\frac pq\simeq\sum_{i=0}^lb_i2^{-i}.$$ Then use a square root algorithm to compute the powers $x^{2^{-i}}$ iteratively. Finally, take the product of the powers where the bit is $1$.
