Re: "The Best Programming Language for the End of the World"

On 12/04/2025 10:57 pm, Hans Bezemer wrote:

On 12-04-2025 03:40, dxf wrote:

subsection "Rounding to significant figures" I'm not seeing anything unexpected
or ambiguous.

 
Neither do I. However, there is more in the world than Wikipedia:
 
https://www.britannica.com/science/significant-figures
https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/frontiers/web/chapter_5/6665.html
https://www.montgomerycollege.edu/_documents/academics/support/learning-centers/ackerman-learning-center-rockville/significant-figures.pdf
https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Analytical_Chemistry/Supplemental_Modules_(Analytical_Chemistry)/Quantifying_Nature/Significant_Digits
https://www.physics.uoguelph.ca/significant-digits-tutorial
https://www.chem.fsu.edu/chemlab/chm1020c/lecture%202/04.php
https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_Chemistry/Introductory_Chemistry_(LibreTexts)/02%3A_Measurement_and_Problem_Solving/2.04%3A_Significant_Figures_in_Calculations
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4483789/
https://www.my-gcsescience.com/decimal-places-significant-figures/
 
.. just to name a few..
 
Look, *IF* we're adding a definition to the standard and *IF* we use the Wikipedia definition - I have no problem with that. Rather a bad definition than no definition (not saying the Wikipedia one is bad). But I don't fool myself into thinking that Wikipedia is *automatically* the most authoritative source.

No but if I were a Standard Forth user I'd like to know what the impact of these
other definitions means in practice.  When I discovered what "correctly rounded"
external representation in IEEE would likely entail I rolled my eyes knowing there
was no way I was going to implement that.  I mean there's theory and then there's
reality.