From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,df84b868ad64e4f7 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!news3.google.com!news.glorb.com!news.banetele.no!news.hacking.dk!news.jacob-sparre.dk!pnx.dk!not-for-mail From: Jacob Sparre Andersen Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: OT: definition of "significant figures" Date: 29 Jul 2005 16:46:36 +0200 Organization: Jacob's private Usenet server Sender: sparre@hugin.crs4.it Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 80.241.165.40 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: jacob-sparre.dk 1122648368 28855 80.241.165.40 (29 Jul 2005 14:46:08 GMT) X-Complaints-To: sparre@jacob-sparre.dk NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 14:46:08 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.4 Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:3850 Date: 2005-07-29T16:46:36+02:00 List-Id: tmoran@acm.org writes: > Given a set of measurements x(i), I'd like to print their average to > the "correct" number of significant figures. eg > 1.11, 1.12, 1.08 => "1.1", 1.11, 1.25, 1.35 => "1" > I've got some adhocery that more or less does it, but is there a > moderately standard, formal, definition? The base 10 logarithm of the standard-deviation of your measurements. Jacob (who as a physicist admits that he may make sign and factor-of-two errors) -- �You have to blow things up to get anything useful.� -- Archchancellor Ridcully