Re: Pi = 3

: "Dr. Dave" <dtate@xxxxxxx>
: I'm not sure I'd even consider it a glitch. What's the alternative --
: to always recast into new units? 10 cm is wrong, but 1 decimeter is
: correct? That's dumb, and it just gets dumber if you're working in
: non-decimal units like gallons or feet.

You could use only mantissa/exponent notation. Or introduce an extra
glyph to serve as a trailing placeholder instead of overloading the zero
glyph. Or add a punctuation mark like ",", but meaning "significance
ends here". Or an explicit "how many significant figures" notation.
Or other possibilities I'm not thinking of right now. So, like

115e2
115xx
115'00
11,500s3

( Of course, the "xx" makes it seem like the 11,500 is a floor rather than
an average, but still... )

But then... all of those are somewhat extreme "solutions", and that's
what I mean by the overloading of zero as meaning "zero" as well as meaning
"insignificant trailing placeholder" being a "not unreasonable" convention.

Or, rephrasing, "I was referring to the overloading as a glitch, YMMV".

I mean... consider your own example

: they reported the height of Mt. Everest as 29,002 when they had
: actually measured 29,000 -- they knew the latter figure would be
: interpreted as rounded

Having to say not-quite-what-you-meant, in order to avoid a serious
misinterpretaiton if you said simply and straightforwardly what you meant.
That sort of says "there's a glitch in this notation" to me. YMMV.

29,000s5


Wayne Throop throopw@xxxxxxxxx http://sheol.org/throopw
.

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