'Unfortunately' you give no credentials for your ex cathedra pronouncement. E.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_digits says The situation regarding trailing zero digits that fall to the left of the decimal place in a number with no digits provided that fall to the right of the decimal place is less clear, but these are typically not considered significant unless the decimal point is placed at the end of the number to indicate otherwise (e.g., "2000." versus "2000"). To make things more clear, trailing zeros are only recognized as significant figures if the number they are a part of has a decimal point. For example, 450 only has two sig figs, but 450. has three. which directly contradicts you. So this is at best a matter of opinion, and credentials do matter for opinions. On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Oliver Czoske wrote: > On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Uwe Ligges wrote: >> Sebastian Spaeth wrote: >>> Hi all, >>> I have a list with a numerical column "cum_hardreuses". By coincidence I >>> discovered this: >>> >>>> max(libs[,"cum_hardreuses"]) >>> [1] 1793 >>> >>>> summary(libs[,"cum_hardreuses"]) >>> Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. >>> 1 2 4 36 14 1790 >>> >>> (note the max value of 1790) Ouch this is bad! Anything I can do to remedy >>> this? Known bug? >> >> No, it's a feature! See ?summary: printing is done up to 3 significant >> digits by default. > > Unfortunately, '1790' is printed with *four* significant digits, not > three. The correct representation with three significant digits would have > to employ scientific notation, 1.79e3. > > -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.