From help-octave-request at che dot utexas dot edu  Fri Jul 15 14:10:46 1994
Subject: Floating point print problems
From: andrew at watsci dot uwaterloo dot ca (Andrew D. Fernandes)
To: help-octave at che dot utexas dot edu
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 94 15:10:37 -0400


Last week I posted a note about my difficulty in getting octave
to print out a nice, clean 1.000000000000000000e+00.

The problem seems to be in the printing routines:

octave:1> format long e
octave:2> x = 1
x =  1.00000047683363e+00
octave:3> x .^ 100
ans =  1.00000047683363e+00
octave:4> quit

seems to be about the norm.

I am using the precompiled octave available from ftp.che.utexas.edu
for irix 4.0.5.

As long as calculations are done accurately internally, this isn't really 
a major bug. What concerns me is if you are relying on saving and loading
floating point data often... the printf and scanf routines could be 
doing some strange things then...

-Andrew. (andrew at watsci dot uwaterloo dot ca)