>>>>> "Richard" == Richard Fateman writes:
Richard> I think we could specify a FORMAT for printing machine
Richard> floats -- let the user specify, for example, format:
Richard> "~10e5";
Did you intend for this to be a Lisp format expression, or something
else? "~10e5" in Lisp would print out the number followed by a
"5". :-)
I think this is sensible. It would make sense to apply this idea to
bfloats as well. I would also say let format be nil (or t) to
represent the default, and use prin1 to print out the number. That
way if the number is small, we get ~f format, but if the number is
very small or very large, we get exponential form. We can't use ~g
for this because large numbers are printed out without exponential
form.
But fpprec is an easy way for someone who doesn't want to read up on
Lisp format expressions to get something sensible.
Ray