Re: Another newbie question

[nwerneck]

Double precision yields about log10(2**(64-1-11)) decimal places of precision,
and single precision attains log10(2**(32-1-8)).

That's enough in most cases. The biggest precision I ever had to use was
to implement digital IIR filters, and I had to use 5 or 6 decimal places...

If you want to memorize PI, it's 3,14159265358979323846264338327950288
as far as I can remember... :)

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 08:12:54PM -0600, Fausto Arinos Barbuto wrote:
> 
> Dear All:
> 
>       Even though output_precision = 48 unveils lots of digits for,
> say, pi or sqrt(2.0), I found out that only the first 15 are exact
> -- the rest seems to be rubbish. I wonder if I am not mistaken, and
> if there is no way to show more digits. After all, Windows ME's
> Calculator shows pi with 32 correct digits. And should 32-digit
> precision is *not* possible, why does Octave show so many useless
> digits?


-- 
Nicolau Werneck <address@hidden>         9F99 25AB E47E 8724 2F71
http://cefala.org/~nwerneck                   EA40 DC23 42CE 6B76 B07F
"The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an 
ugly fact. "
-- Thomas Huxley



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