From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Thu Jul 31 09:48:10 2003 Subject: Re: Another newbie question From: "Fausto Arinos de A. Barbuto" To: Octave Help List Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 08:47:28 -0600 Dear Mr. Eaton, At 10:44 PM 7/30/2003 -0500, you wrote: >Octave does floating point arithmetic. It is not an arbitray >precision calculator. Thank you, but I learnt that already. :-) What intrigues me is why does Octave show so many inexact, deceiving digits after the 15th decimal place. 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. Whether or not improved real number representation can be implemented in Octave in the future is another story. But I can't help pondering about those two points. >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? For the time being, a warning in Octave's manual would suffice. That can be easily done -- or can't? Thanks, ---Fausto ------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html -------------------------------------------------------------