It looks like 2*10^-13 miles is about twice the inter atomic distance in diamond:)
-------- Paul Anderson -- VE3HOP On 2012-08-30, at 4:22 AM, Chris Stinemetz <chrisstinem...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> >> Because floating-point arithmetic as done by limited precision computers is >> always an approximation. An IEEE 754 double-precision 64-bit floating point >> number uses a 53-bit fraction and therefore has about 16 decimal digits of >> precision. So calculating zero within 13 digits (e-013) is pretty good. >> >> The calculation done by the Geo::Ellipsoid module is very complex and >> involves sines, cosines, tangents, etc. Precision will be lost with each >> floating-point operation. >> >> Have you worked out what 2e-13 miles is in inches? For all practical >> purposes, it IS zero. >> > > Thank you for the great explanation. Yes that is close enough to 0 for > me :) Thanks again. > > -Chris > > -- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org > For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org > http://learn.perl.org/ > > -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
