At 03:26 PM 7/13/2001 -0400, Michael G Schwern wrote:
>On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 06:09:07PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> > Depending on what you do with them, precision (or, rather,
> > significant digits) is a useful concept for integers as well. Just
> > because you have, for example, an integer with 43 digits doesn't
> > mean that all 43 are actually useful or trustable--you may only have
> > 2 or 3 that mean anything.
>
>I digress...
>
>They went through Great Pains in Engineering class to hammer into our
>head that 43 != 43.0 != 4.3 x 10 in the land of significant figures
>and taught us all these special considerations for preserving sig figs
>through mathematical operations.
In my case it was Chemistry and Physics classes.
[Good description of sig figs snipped]
>I have no idea if this is what Dan was thinking.
Yup, it was. The core can potentially use this information to limit what
gets returned from math ops--there's no point (it's downright deceptive, in
fact) in calculating sin($foo) to 18 digits if $foo has only 2 sig figs.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
