> On Dec 2, 2005, at 7:55 AM, Olin Lathrop wrote:
>
> > There's enough public misunderstanding about this concept that it's
> > important (in fact irresponsible not to) for us engineers and
> > scientists to state it correctly.  This sort of erroneous statement
> > and imprecise use of terms needs to be squashed whenever
> possible to
> > avoid even more confusion and misunderstanding by non-technical
> > people.
>
> Yeah, I found the whole discussion back in Jr High about
> precision and significant digits very enlightening, and try
> to keep it in mind.  The public misunderstanding shows up
> pretty clearly when you get something like conversion from
> english fractional units to metric decimal units.
> 1.5875  mm indeed.  Hah!
>
> BillW


Any yet there is not a SINGLE computer language that tracks the actual
precision of calculations! E.g. When you multiply 1 byte times another 1
byte the result should be stored in 2 bytes. If you add 1 bytes to another 1
byte, the result should be stored in 2 bytes with only the lowest bit of the
second byte used.

http://www.sxlist.com/techref/expeval2.asp is my poor attempt to do such a
thing. Play with it and tell me why programmers don't demand that ability in
their compilers?

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