Re: [Gretl-users] typo in User's guide
On Wed, 26 Jul 2017, Summers, Peter wrote:
Hi all,
I've come across a typo on p. 80 in the user's guide. In
discussing how to access elements of an array, there's the
following example:
<verbatim>
# for M an array of matrices
printf "\n%#12.5\n", M[1]
</verbatim>
The second line should be
printf "\n%12.5f\n", M[1]
Thanks, Peter. There was a typo, but actually what we had in mind in
this case was
printf "\n%#12.5g\n", M[1]
The conversion 'g' for floating-point numbers means "use scientific
notation if necessary" (i.e. for very big or very small numbers),
and the '#' modifier means, print any trailing zeros to the given
precision.
With 'g', the "precision" value (here 5) refers to significant
digits rather than decimal places. So it's a better choice than 'f'
for numbers that might, for all the code-writer knows, be very big
or small.
Allin