From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Wed Jul 30 22:44:32 2003
Subject: Another newbie question
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Fausto Arinos Barbuto <fausto_barbuto at yahoo dot ca>
Cc: Octave Help List <help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 22:44:20 -0500

On 30-Jul-2003, Fausto Arinos Barbuto <fausto_barbuto at yahoo dot ca> wrote:

| 	Even though output_precision = 48 unveils lots of digits for,
| say, pi or sqrt(2.0), I found out that only the first 15 are exact
| -- the rest seems to be rubbish.

Octave does floating point arithmetic.  It is not an arbitray
precision calculator.

| And should 32-digit
| precision is *not* possible, why does Octave show so many useless
| digits?

Perhaps a warning should be issued if you try to set output_precision
too high.  It should be relatively easy to do so.  Would someone like
to provide a patch?

Thanks,

jwe



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