Hi Paul, > Perhaps this is because I am a fan of shorter, more-intuitive numbers. You can > blame me for the fact that in Emacs the double-precision floating-point number > closest to 0.1 displays as "0.1" rather than as the more-precise but uglier > "0.10000000000000001".
Likewise, in Lisp culture, this kind of shorter external representation of floating-point is used: - In Common Lisp, it is specified by the standard [1]. The goal to use as few digits as possible is implicit. - Likewise, in Scheme, it is specified by the standard [2]. - Some schemers even thought it was worthwhile to write a paper about their implementation of this specification. [3]. Bruno [1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/util/html/cltl/clm/node187.html "reading a printed representation produces an object that is ... equal to the originally printed object." [2] http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/HTML/r5rs-Z-H-9.html#%_sec_6.2.6 "... is expressed using the minimum number of digits ..." [3] http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/FP-Printing-PLDI96-abstract.html
