3 ms·
Are you proposing doing away with IEEE 754? That's probably the origin of all these extra digits.
by mark-r 7y ago
Are you proposing doing away with IEEE 754? That's probably the origin of all these extra digits.
- maxerickson 7y agoNot at all. I'm suggesting people think about what they are doing. Blindly sticking numbers into a format that is designed to be computationally efficient is not a great way to store data. That doesn't mean that a computationally efficient representation is useless.
- mark-r 7y agoAnd I'm suggesting that using the built-in floating point representation is a good thing overall, even if it doesn't allow you to specify a precision.
- maxerickson 7y agoI'm confused by this reply. Like I said "Not at all.". But the point is, if you have some data that you want to communicate, it is also a good idea to store the precision.
- mark-r 7y agoIt's actually very rare that you need to know the precision of a number, and it's thrown away as soon as you read the value into a standard floating point variable. Keeping the precision is usually more trouble than it's worth.