Precision of output

[John Darrington]

An issue which arose yesterday when I was trying to use pspp in my
work:

It seems that many procedures output their results with a fixed
precision. I happened to need a greater precision than PSPP was
displaying. 

The relevant section of pspp code (which I wrote) uses tab_float with
a literal interger for its W and D parameters.  Perhaps it should have
used tab_value, and passed the variable's print member to  FMT_SPEC ;
the problem is, in that particular routine, the variable is out of
scope (however see below!).

A quick browse through the code of other procedures shows that there
are perhaps quite a lot of places where this problem has crept in.
Perhaps we should do an audit of these sometime --- although I'd have
to think hard about the general problem to know what the correct
precision and width should be an all cases.  For example, given a
bunch of integers, it might be necessary to know the mean value with
better than integer precision ...

Maybe it'd be better to modify tab_float so that the sentinel value
-1, displays values with variable precision ? ie using %g.


J'

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