Well,
I have been trying to avoid coming in to this discussion. But, IMHO,
maxima is for the use of scientists, not accountants (no
disparagement intended). It really makes a difference whether you
see 6 or 7 decimals or the standard 16 decimals of most floating
point calculations.
When I write sqrt(2) or %pi, I actually feel better to see the
standard double precision output.
I am one of those people who almost immediately writes 'format long'
in matlab, except in big matrix calculations. If I want less output, I
can easily get it.
So, I opt for the default still being fpprintprec: 16. Let users
shorten it for their own purposes, but, PLEASE, keep the default as it
is.
-sen
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| Sheldon E. Newhouse | e-mail: sen1 at math.msu.edu |
| Mathematics Department | |
| Michigan State University | telephone: 517-355-9684 |
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On Thu, 12 Apr 2007, Robert Dodier wrote:
> On 4/12/07, Daniel Lakeland <dlakelan at street-artists.org> wrote:
>
>> I vote for fpprintprec = 6.
>
> I think I'm in agreement with this.
>
> I wonder if grind should respect fpprintprec. (From trying an
> example, it looks like it does.) grind is advertised as a function
> which prints stuff in a format suitable as input. I think that's
> a useful idea, so it seems like grind should try to print floats
> so that they have whatever digits are stored. (Yes, I know that
> the last one could be different after doing float --> grind -->
> float.)
>
> FWIW
> Robert
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