Re: How to Define High-precision Date type

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006 06:45:30 GMT, in comp.lang.c , Martin Ambuhl
<mambuhl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Be careful is assuming stating that 15 significant digits ("digits after
the decimal point" is meaningless) is "very low". When 15 significant
decimal digits allows expressing the average distance from the sun to
the earth to with 0.15 mm, that is high accuracy, indeed.

OTOH, when buying a couple of tonnes of Platinum in Tunisian Dinar,
its easy to rapidly lose all 15 digits, and the discrepancy is quite
expensive... :-)

The place that greater precision becomes meaningful is in intermendiate
results in some arithmetic operations.

This is absolutely true.

If I found my problem required values beyond
the capabilities of long doubles (18 significant figures and a range of
1e-4391 to 1e4392 on my implementation), I would seriously consider
whether I had pathologogical data or an algorithm that needed fixing.

Or you work in astronomy or finance...


Mark McIntyre
--
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
--Brian Kernighan
.

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  • Re: How to Define High-precision Date type
    ... decimal digits allows expressing the average distance from the sun to ... the earth to with 0.15 mm, that is high accuracy, indeed. ...
    (comp.lang.c)