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From: dkurfis@enet.net
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Higher precision and generics
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 95 01:05:00 PST
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Date: 1995-03-20T01:05:00-08:00
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To anyone confused by my previous post:

	Earlier today, Keith Thompson pointed out that my interpretation of 
the "digits" part of a floating-point type definition was incorrect.  Keith 
is absolutely right.  My interpretation has always been "digits to the right 
of the decimal point".  The correct interpretation renders much of my 
previous post meaningless.

	I've been stewing over this today, wondering how I could have made 
such a gross error all these years.  Since I'm still using Ada83, I still 
use MIL-STD-1815A as my primary reference.  Paragraph 3.5.7, part 6, states 
that the static expression for digits "...is the minimum number of decimal 
digits required after the point in the decimal mantissa...".  What I 
(obviously) failed to notice when I learned the language several years ago 
is that the previous paragraph had defined "mantissa" to be normalized.  
When I saw this today, I realized where my error came from.

	Anyway, I hope this didn't cause anyone too much confusion, and I 
want to thank Keith Thompson for pointing out my error.  This is exactly 
what I expect this forum to be all about, even if I'm the one being 
corrected.  Thanks.


						Dan Kurfis