On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Jeroen Demeyer <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2011-06-08 21:23, Jason Grout wrote: >> So there is already something special about where the decimal point is >> placed. > Not really. My claim is that > 4.000000000000000000000000000000 > and > 4000000000000000000000000000000. > and > 4000000000000000000000000000000e100 > should have the same precision.
Which they do, that's not the question here. The question is really whether 0.00000000000000000000000000000000 should have the same precision as 1.00000000000000000000000000000000 I think it should, as the only semantic information trailing zeros could possibly carry is an attempt to increase precision. I find the fact that adding zeros to the latter increases precision, but adding zeros to the former does not, to be surprising. To me, trailing zeros are the unnecessary zeros to the right of a decimal expansion (whether or not they come after a non-zero digit), and are used to denote precision. Whether 000000000000000000.0 and 0.000000000000000000 have the same precision is a smaller question, but I'm inclined to say yes. - Robert -- To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
