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From: "Jacques Carette" <carette@mcmaster.ca>
To: <caml-list@inria.fr>
Subject: RE: [Caml-list] float pretty-printing precision, once more.
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 10:37:17 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <EOEHLEIACBIFHDANCLHKKEIECIAA.carette@mcmaster.ca> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <97FCFA94-0C40-11D7-B751-0003930FCE12@inria.fr>

Damien Doligez wrote:

> In the current working version (3.06+18), the precision used by
> string_of_float has been increased to 17 digits.  I *think* this
> is enough to represent all the double-precision floating-point
> numbers:

Almost...  there are a few (rare) cases where 18 Digits are needed!  But 18
is indeed the 'right' number, assuming the system does proper IEEE rounding.
I am not an expert on this, but I used to have one as an employee (back when
I was manager of the Mathematics Group at Maple), and I learned this from
him.

> I don't know if we will keep this change for the next release
> of O'Caml.

Correctness and ease-of-use do clash badly when it comes to FP.  I prefer
correctness, because latter syntactic sugar can deal with the ease-of-use
problem, but the other way around does not work at all.

Jacques C.

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  reply	other threads:[~2002-12-10 15:37 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2002-12-09 23:04 jeanmarc.eber
2002-12-09 23:46 ` Yaron M. Minsky
2002-12-10  0:07 ` Brian Hurt
2002-12-10  2:13 ` David Chase
2002-12-10  9:49 ` Xavier Leroy
2002-12-10 13:09 ` Damien Doligez
2002-12-10 15:37   ` Jacques Carette [this message]
2002-12-10 15:47   ` Xavier Leroy
2002-12-11  4:03     ` David Chase
2002-12-12  1:41       ` David Chase

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