On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 2:00 AM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: > I have a bunch of floating point values. For example, here's a few (printed > as reprs): > > 38.0 > 41.2586 > 40.75280000000001 > 49.25 > 33.795199999999994 > 36.837199999999996 > 34.1489 > 45.5 > > Fundamentally, these numbers have between 0 and 4 decimal digits of > precision...
Terminology question: Why do you count only what's after the decimal point? I would describe these as having between 2 and 6 significant figures. Will they always have two digits before the decimal, or does your precision really care only about what's after it? Of course, there would still remain the problem of describing 49.25 with 6 sig figs, in the same way that it's hard to explain to someone that you really do need to leave in five minutes (but if you said you had to leave in six minutes, they'd believe you to be accurate to the minute). But I assume that's not part of the question. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list