Curious Omission In New-Style Formats

[Ian Kelly]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 9:39 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro
<lawrencedo99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, July 14, 2016 at 12:46:26 PM UTC+12, Ian wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 4:24 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, July 13, 2016 at 6:22:31 PM UTC+12, Ian wrote:
>>>
>>>> ... don't call it "precision".
>>>
>>> How about “mantissa length”, then. That sufficiently neutral for you?
>>
>> That makes even less sense for integers.
>
> Why?

Because integers don't have a mantissa.

Side note, neither do floating point numbers, really; what is often
called the mantissa is more properly known as the significand. But
integers don't have that either.

Back to naming, I think the best you could do would just be something
utterly generic like "formatted size". It doesn't help that in some
cases it represents a minimum size and in other cases a maximum, so
you can't even characterize it with that.