At 04:55 PM 7/12/2001 -0500, David L. Nicol wrote:
>John Porter wrote:
> >
> > David L. Nicol wrote:
> > > First off, I'm going to pound on one of my deceased horses a bit:
> >
> > I'll add one obligatory thwack with my own barbed flog, David. Hear hear.
> >
> > > > my Num $dec = 4.0;
> > > > my Int $int = $dec; # Num -> Int okay since 4.0
> truncates to 4
> > > > # with no(?) information lost
> > >
> > > You have lost information. You have lost one digit of precision.
> > > That is not insignificant.
> >
> > Correction: You have added an infinite number of digits of precision.
> > Integers have infinite precision.
>
>Interesting. Integers are Ideal and Floats are Approximate.
>
>Implying, that "precision" would be a useful thing to have in a
>bigfloat package, to mitigate the easily vast flood of garbage
>that you'd get on first reference to either a repeater or an irrational.
Precision is a useful thing with bigfloats so something like 1/3 doesn't
chew up all your available memory. Depending on what you do with them,
precision (or, rather, significant digits) is a useful concept for integers
as well. Just because you have, for example, an integer with 43 digits
doesn't mean that all 43 are actually useful or trustable--you may only
have 2 or 3 that mean anything.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
