Accuracy Management of early HPs

[EdS2]

Thanks for the link back, there's a good description in there.

At least the early HPs tend to display to some fixed number of decimal places - that's a good practice for science and engineering, and almost always means that the displayed result will have fewer digits than the calculated result.

But at the time of purchase or demonstration, or in schoolyard competition, being able to take the square root of 2 and square it, and apparently get back the number you started with, has a clear attraction.

Quote:The argument raged for quite some time, IIRC, about the advantages of 10 good rounded digits vs. 13 digits displayed as 10.