changing floating point number input.. (was realroots...)

>>>>> "Richard" == Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> writes:

    Richard> Effects: if you put too many digits in a number like
    Richard> 1.234567890123456789012345e0, then you will get a bigfloat.  If your program

I think I'd be annoyed with this because sometimes I WANT a float, not
a bigfloat, and having to count digits to make sure it's not
auto-annoyingly converted to bigfloat is not nice.  Yes, I could type
float(<lot 'o digits>), but that's annoying too.

    Richard> doesn't work with bigfloats, this might be a problem.
    Richard> if you put too large an exponent, e.g.  1.234e600,  instead of getting an
    Richard> error, you get a bigfloat.

This is less annoying, and I could live with this.

Ray