George Neuner wrote: > That's true. But it is a situation where the conversion to SI units > loses precision and therefore probably shouldn't be done.
<snip/> > I don't care to check it ... the fact that the SI unit involves 12 > decimal places whereas the imperial unit involves 3 tells me the > conversion probably shouldn't be done in a program that wants > accuracy. Your comment is absurd for multiple reasons. As we are focusing on the computational aspect of this issue then I will only say this: If we are dealing with a computer representation of numbers then, as long as the numeric data type provides enough precision, it is perfectly irrelevant if a decimal representation of a certain number involves 12 or 3 decimal places. The only precision issues which affect a calculation is the ones arising from a) the ability to exactly represent a certain number in a specific representation and b) the precision errors produced by arithmetic operations. Rui Maciel -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
