I think I agree with you. First, we are looking at the display in decimal an internal floating point number. However it is displayed, the internal floating point number will be the same. It just looks weird with alll the 9's followed by an 8. Internally it would still take 8 bytes even if it were floating point one.
The thing that bothers me is that how does x: know that 6.3 is a good representation for 31499999999999999r5000000000000000? On 10/2/07, John Randall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On 10/2/07, Raul Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >> It seems to me that if a number displayed with the digits > >> indicated by 9!:10 has exactly the same bit pattern as that > >> number displayed to full precision then the more concise > >> variant should be used. > >> > >> Currently, we get: > >> > >> 6.3&] > >> 6.2999999999999998&] > > > Raul: > > For printing a floating point number, J has simply to round it to a > fixed number of significant digits. It does not have to consider other > decimal numbers with the same bit pattern. > > What you are suggesting seems considerably more complicated: it would > require J to take a floating point number and, among all decimal > numbers with the same bit pattern, select the one with the fewest > significant digits. > > In my opinion, this a large price to pay for a cosmetic improvement. > However, I may be misunderstanding what you are saying. > > > Best wishes, > > John > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
