Ola
Number of decimal places and precision are not necessarily related, at
least not
on a computer. The relationship you learn in math and physics (round off to
the number of significant digits + 1) is of no concern to the computer.
Matlab and
excel have the same limitation. The programmer's choice to show zeros
rather than
the imprecise results from round-off errors after an operation may be nice
for the
intuitive user, but don't really provide information. For example,
1.000000 +/- 0.2
is just as accurate as 1.00233748 +/- 0.2. The round-off provides useful
information
sometimes even.
Not to say that something useful couldn't be done. It should be possible
to pass
numbers with a precision qualifier and propagate it through your
equations, but
nobody has done this and I don't know of any other numerical
packages/spreadsheets
that do.
Happy computing,
Willem
On 2003.08.01 02:02 Fausto Arinos de A. Barbuto wrote:
On Thu, 2003-07-31 at 10:58, John W. Eaton wrote:
> | Take Excel as an example. One can increase
> | the floating point representation of any real number by as many
> | decimal places as he/she wants. However, only zeroes are shown
> | from the 14th decimal place on. It also marvels me that a much-
> | less-than-professional program such as Windows Calculator can
> | represent real numbers with 31 exact decimal places -- and Octave
> | can't.
>
> If you are trolling, find another venue. If you have a real
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