Re: [Chicken-users] Numbers weirdness

[John Cowan]

Peter Bex scripsit:

> That's a complete mischaracterisation.  First, it depends on your
> definition of "accurately", and secondly, you can tell CHICKEN to
> change the print precision.  See my other mail, which shows that
> Racket is _also_ truncating the value, just after more digits than
> CHICKEN is doing so.

By "accurately" I mean what is meant in the Burger & Dybvig paper
"Printing Floating-Point Numbers Quickly and Accurately" at
<http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/FP-Printing-PLDI96.pdf>.
That is, printing the shortest correctly rounded output string
that converts to the same IEEE double value when read back in.
Of course it is possible to generate more digits than that,
but they are more precise than IEEE double format allows for,
and therefore are essentially garbage.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        address@hidden
My corporate data's a mess!
It's all semi-structured, no less.
But I'll be carefree / Using XSLT
On an XML DBMS.