Paul D. Anderson wrote: > Multiplying two floats produces a number whose potential precision is the sum > of the operands' precision. We need a method to determine what the precision > of the product should be. Not that it's difficult to come up with an answer > -- but we have to agree on something.
Not more precision than the input data deserve. The decimal floating-point numbers of the new IEEE 754-2008 carry with them a notion of “how precise is this result?”; this might be a good starting point for discussion. —Joel Salomon