[Carpet] CarpetIOBasic defaults to fixed precision for values as small as 1e-8

[Erik Schnetter]

On Aug 10, 2006, at 10:20:50, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:

> Hi,
>
> In formatting INFO output, CarpetIOBasic defaults to printing values
> in fixed format (C "%f") if they're between  real_min  and  real_max,
> and in scientific format (C "%g") otherwise.  The default settings
> (in the current-darcs version) are
>   real_min = 1.0e-8
>   real_max = 1.0e+3
>
> It seems to me that it would be useful to raise  real_min  to 1.0e-4
> or so.  Since the default fixed format has 7 digits after the decimal
> point, this would ensure that at least 3 significant figures would
> always be printed.  In contrast, the current-darcs default prints
> some nonzero values (eg 2.0e-8) as "0.0000000", which I find quite
> confusing.
>
> comments?

%g is not the scientific format.  %g chooses between scientific and  
fixed form automatically, depending on the number of digits to be  
shown and the value to be printed.  Basically, %g prefers fixed  
format, but it makes sure that no digits are "wasted" with  
superfluous zeros.  Scientific format is %e.  Personally I prefer to  
use %g always, since it makes the right choice -- except if you don't  
want the scientific format at all, in which case one would use %f.

-erik

-- 
Erik Schnetter <schnetter at cct.lsu.edu>

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