Re: How to detect a double's significant digits

Jeremy Bowers wrote:

Step one for mrstephengross is to *rigorously* define what he means by
"significant digits", then go from there. Since I think he mentioned
something about predicting how much space it will take to print out, my
suggestion is to run through whatever printing routines there are and get
a string out, the measure the string, as anything else will likely be
wrong. If that's not possible with the formatting library, you've already
lost; you'll have to completely correctly re-implement the formatting
library, and not only is that a major PITA, you almost never get it
bug-for-bug right...

Especially since all of his examples have the same number of significant digits (3), as the term is usually meant. Zeroes to the right are significant, not zeroes to the left.

--
Erik Max Francis && max@xxxxxxxxxxx && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
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  -- Louis Wu
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