Curious Omission In New-Style Formats

Antoon Pardon antoon.pardon at rece.vub.ac.be
Wed Jul 13 10:01:09 EDT 2016


Op 13-07-16 om 10:49 schreef Steven D'Aprano:
> On Wednesday 13 July 2016 17:05, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday, July 13, 2016 at 6:22:31 PM UTC+12, Ian wrote:
>>
>>> I never claimed it's not useful. I don't really have a problem with
>>> format supporting it, either. But if it does, then don't call it
>>> "precision".
>> Like it or not, that is the accepted term, as used in the printf(3) man page.
>>
>> Feel free not to use common accepted terms if you don’t want. You can use
>> words to mean whatever you avocado, but don’t expect other people to carrot.
> +1 QOTW

But as far as I know, "significant digits" is not the accepted term for the
width of the representation when you print a number with added zeroes in front of it.

So when we start we a term like "precision" and people jump from that to "significant
digits", maybe we should consider how confusing the common accepted term can be.

-- 
Antoon





More information about the Python-list mailing list