[R] number precision

[Duncan Murdoch]

pieterprovoost at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to find a way to determine how many digits a number has. I tried using nchar(paste(number)), but unfortunately paste will reduce 8.00 to "8".
>   

I think your problem is that "the number of digits a number has" is not 
a property of the number (since the numbers 8.00 and 8 are the same 
number).  You need to keep track of the digits in some other way.  One 
possibility is to store two numbers:  the lowest possible value and the 
highest possible value.  Then 8.00 would be stored as (7.995,  8.005).  
It's then possible (but not easy) to propagate these ranges through 
transformations.

Duncan Murdoch
> Any thoughts?
> Pieter
>
> --
> This message was sent on behalf of pieterprovoost at gmail.com at openSubscriber.com
> http://www.opensubscriber.com/messages/r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch/topic.html
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>