On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 7:02 AM, Grant Edwards <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2015-02-12, Ian Kelly <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 1:23 PM, Hrvoje Nikšić <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> {:.15g} is supposed to give 15 digits of precision, but with trailing >>> zeros removed. >> >> The doc says with "insignificant" trailing zeros removed, not all >> trailing zeros. > > Can somebody explain the difference between "significant" and > "insignificant" tailing zeros to somebody who barely passed his single > numerical methods class? [Though I have, on occasion, had to tinker > with the innards of SW floating point libraries and could fish a > hardcopy of IEEE-754 out of a filing cabinet if needed.]
Significant digits are within the precision of the calculation. Writing 1.230 indicates that the fourth digit is known to be zero. Writing 1.23 outside a context of exact calculation indicates that the fourth digit is unknown due to insufficient precision. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
