Re: [Gretl-users] Data format

On Sat, 10 Oct 2015, Sven Schreiber wrote: I wouldn't say it's a bug: the option of examining a series in a customized format was intended as an ad hoc thing. To go back to the original question, Raul said, "Numbers like 90454.8169 are displayed in Gretl without decimal places." I'm surprised if these are displayed with _no_ decimal places. Here's a little test comma-separated file: <csv> x,y 90454.8169,1 90454.8269,2 90455.0,3 90454.8765,4 </csv> and here's a little script to display the values: <hansl> open digits.csv print --byobs printf "%.4f\n", x </hansl> which produces the output: <output> ? print --byobs x y 1 90454.82 1 2 90454.83 2 3 90455.00 3 4 90454.88 4 1 90454.8169 2 90454.8269 3 90455.0000 4 90454.8765 </output> Here the default printing of the series with the --byobs flag shows 2 decimal places for the x variable. The "printf" command also shows how a series can be printed with a specific format: "%.4f" calls for 4 decimal places. By default gretl displays numerical values to a number of decimal places (or significant digits) that reflects a tradeoff between precision and avoidance of unncessary verbosity. You can always use printf to look at numbers with any precision you like. Internally, numerical values are always stored in "double precision" (that is, using 64 bits, which corresponds to 15 or 16 significant digits). You can print numbers to more than 16 digits but the tail will just be noise. Besides, for actual socioeconomic data its likely that anything beyond 5 or 6 digits is just noise. (Really high precision physical measurements might yield data good to 9 or 10 digits.) Allin Cottrell