Marco van de Voort wrote:
And if it reads 103000e-03 (103000 IS periodic), the value is slightly wrong...
103000 is a whole number (not periodic, or with a period of 0 if you like) and can be represented exactly. But `e-03', i.e. 10**(-3) is not.
Afaik whole numbers can be periodic in Floating Point too?
Nope, being a whole number is independent of the base. Maybe I should have said integer (but AFAIK, whole number means the same), then it should be more apparent to any programmer that integers can be read and written in any base...
In floating point representations like IEEE, an integer number like 10100101(binary) will be represented as 1.0100101(binary) * 2**7, i.e. exactly, since the exponent is also of base 2.
Maybe what you mean is that integers with more valid digits than can be represented will be cut (e.g. 110000000000000000000000000000001(binary) becomes 1.1(binary) * 2**32 in ShortReal or something). That's true, but it's not really periodic...
Frank