Calculate PI up to 42 decimal places - c++

Question

I'm trying to write a program that uses the series to compute the value of PI. The user will input how far it wants the program to compute the series and then the program should output its calculated value of PI. I believe I've successfully written the code for this, however it does not do well with large numbers and only gives me a few decimal places. When I tried to use cout << fixed << setprecision(42); It just gave me "nan" as the value of PI.
int main() {
long long seqNum; // sequence number users will input
long double val; // the series output
cout << "Welcome to the compute PI program." << endl; // welcome message
cout << "Please inter the sequence number in the form of an integer." << endl;
cin >> seqNum; // user input
while ( seqNum < 0) // validation, number must be positive
{
cout << "Please enter a positive number." << endl;
cin >> seqNum;
} // end while
if (seqNum > 0)
{
for ( long int i = 0; i < seqNum; i++ )
{
val = val + 4*(pow(-1.00,i)/(1 + 2*i)); // Gregory-Leibniz sum calculation
}// end for
cout << val;
} // end if
return 0;
}
Any help would be really appreciated. Thank you

Answer 1

Your problem involves an elementary, fundamental principle related to double values: a double, or any floating point type, can hold only a fixed upper limit of significant digits. There is no unlimited digits of precision with plain, garden-variety doubles. There's a hard, upper limit. The exact limit is implementation defined, but on modern C++ implementations the typical limit is just 16 or 17 digits of precision, not even close to your desired 42 digits of precision.
#include <limits>
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
std::cout << std::numeric_limits<double>::max_digits10 << std::endl;
return 0;
}
This gives you the maximum digits of precision with your platform/C++ compiler. This shows a maximum of 17 digits of precision with g++ 9.2 on Linux (max_digits10 is C++11 or later, use digits10 with old C++ compilers to show a closely-related metric).
Your desired 42 digits of precision likely far exceed what your modest doubles can handle. There are various special-purpose math libraries that can perform calculations with higher levels of precision, you can investigate those, if you wish.

Answer 2

You did not initialize or assign any value to val, but you are reading it when you get to the first iteration of
val = val + 4*(pow(-1.00,i)/(1 + 2*i));
This cause your program to have undefined behavior. Initialize val, probably to zero:
long double val = 0; // the series output
That aside, as mentioned in the answer of #SamVarshavchik there is a hard limit on the precision you can reach with the built-in floating point types and 42 places significance is almost certainly outside of that. Similarly the integer types that you are using are limited in size to probably at most 2^64 which is approximately 10^19.
Even if these limits weren't the problem, the series requires summation of roughly 10^42 terms to get PI to a precision of 42 places. It would take you longer than the universe has been around to calculate to that precision with all of earths current computing power combined.