Precision and CD's

Bruce R Miller bruce.miller at nist.gov
Mon Jul 19 20:39:46 CEST 1999


A Noble effort; thank you very much!
But, alas, it demonstrates _exactly_ the problem I expected.

David Carlisle wrote:
> It uses 123e3 notation for radix 10 floats and  explicitly does
> mantissa times (radix ^ exponent) otherwise. 
[...]
> <OMOBJ>
> <OMA>
>   <OMS cd="bigfloat" name="bigfloat"/>
>   <OMI> 567890 </OMI>
>   <OMI> 17 </OMI>
>   <OMI> 10 </OMI>
> </OMA>
> </OMOBJ>

=>
> <mrow><mn>567890</mn><mo>X</mo><msup><mn>17</mn><mn>10</mn></msup></mrow>

The radix = 17 was a nice touch :>, but certainly, given the bigfloat 
defn, several applications will be perfectly justified in exporting 
bigfloats w/ radix=16, and I probably wont have any control over it.

So, I can expect my Live Math documents to look like this:

  "The first zero of the Airy function, a_1, is at
                               -9
         a_1 = -160673517802x16
    ..."

Am I the only one that has a problem with this?

---
bruce.miller at nist.gov
http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/



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