Damien Doligez wrote:

> In the current working version (3.06+18), the precision used by
> string_of_float has been increased to 17 digits.  I *think* this
> is enough to represent all the double-precision floating-point
> numbers:

Almost...  there are a few (rare) cases where 18 Digits are needed!  But 18
is indeed the 'right' number, assuming the system does proper IEEE rounding.
I am not an expert on this, but I used to have one as an employee (back when
I was manager of the Mathematics Group at Maple), and I learned this from
him.

> I don't know if we will keep this change for the next release
> of O'Caml.

Correctness and ease-of-use do clash badly when it comes to FP.  I prefer
correctness, because latter syntactic sugar can deal with the ease-of-use
problem, but the other way around does not work at all.

Jacques C.

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