On 11-10-09 4:00 AM, (Ted Harding) wrote:
On 09-Oct-11 00:46:58, Carl Witthoft wrote:

On 10/8/11 6:11 PM, (Ted Harding) wrote:

Carl Witthoft's serendipitous discovery is a nice example
of how secrets can be guessed by wondering "what if ... ?".
So probably you don;t need to tell the secrets.

Taking the "negative digits" to their logical extreme:

    round(654.321,2)
    # [1] 654.32
    round(654.321,1)
    # [1] 654.3
    round(654.321,0)
    # [1] 654
    round(654.321,-1)
    # [1] 650
    round(654.321,-2)
    # [1] 700
    round(654.321,-3)
    # [1] 1000
    round(654.321,-4)
    # [1] 0

which is what you'd logically expect (but is it what you
would intuitively expect?).

Oh, oh, somebody's going all metaphysical on us.

Nor should one forget the rounding rules (not OS-dependent
in this case, I think ... ?):

   round(5000,-4)
   # [1] 0
   round(15000,-4)
   # [1] 20000

The intention is that those are not OS dependent, but since they rely on exact representations, there could be differences: not all platforms support the "extended real" 80 bit intermediate representations. (If you were rounding to 0 d.p., they should all agree on a "round to even" rule. Rounding to -4 d.p. involves dividing by 10^4, and that could lead to errors.)

Duncan Murdoch

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