On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 11:38 PM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: > I'm trying to intuit, from the values I've been given, which coordinates > are likely to be accurate to within a few miles. I'm willing to accept > a few false negatives. If the number is float("38"), I'm willing to > accept that it might actually be float("38.0000"), and I might be > throwing out a good data point that I don't need to.
You have one chance in ten, repeatably, of losing a digit. That is, roughly 10% of your four-decimal figures will appear to be three-decimal, and 1% of them will appear to be two-decimal, and so on. Is that "a few" false negatives? It feels like a lot IMO. But then, there's no alternative - the information's already gone. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list