Counting significant figures in Python?

Question

Is there a way in Python to count the significant figures in a double/float/etc? I'm not seeing an easy way to do this, but I'd expect it to be in the library.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

No. Significant digits are just not that big a deal and get little support in computer languages. People doing real computations need error bars, which have far more precision — real measurements say very exact things like “this is 0.11 ± 0.03mm“ instead of saying either of the less exact statements “this is 0.1 mm” or “this is 0.11 mm” which makes you choose a power of ten even if your inexactness does not actually fall at a power of ten.

Answer 2

You may be interested in an arbitrary precision floating point library such as this one:

http://code.google.com/p/mpmath/

Answer 3

I found a solution to this post in another question:

Python counting significant digits

The idea here is that you pass the float as a String to the methods, and then the method uses regular expressions to count the number of significant digits by splitting strings where "e" is (for float string in scientific format) and where the dot is (for normal float strings).

It seems to work well up to 8 significant digits, but the behavior is not guaranteed after the 9th.

Still, I believe this is better than the

"Significant digits are just not that big a deal and get little support in computer languages"

response. It may not be easy, but you can definitely do it, even if not perfectly.

Answer 4

Computers simply don't work that way, at least, not unless they are programmed to do so. The assumption is the number you give them is exact. If you create the number 2/3 as 0.6666666666666667, then all operations treat it as exactly that. That error in the least significant digit may end up propagating to larger errors in later computations, but this is something that good code should deal with, using algorithms that minimize these issues when possible.

As I said however, computers do what they are told to do. So there are packages written that use what is called interval arithmetic. A number may then be described as an interval, so we might create 2/3 as the interval [0.6666666666666666,0.6666666666666667]. We can operate on intervals, adding, subtracting, multiplying, etc. Those operations will often see interval widths expand as we operate with them.

The fact is however, even if you use interval arithmetic tools, it is YOU who must know at the beginning the number of significant digits in your numbers. If you create a number as 2.2, storing it as a double, then the computer will actually try to store the number as 2.200000000000000, and assume that all the digits are exactly correct. In fact of course, because floating point arithmetic is employed, the number will actually be stored internally as a binary number. So 2.2 will probably be effectively stored as the number:

2.20000000000000017763568394002504646778106689453125

because most decimal fractional numbers are not representable exactly in binary form. Again, care must be employed in all software, but also always by the person who is using those tools to understand what their numbers really mean.

This last point is important. Many people treat the numbers generated by a computer as truth, as handed down by the computer god on a stone tablet. If the computer prints out 1.4523656535725, they believe every digit of what they see. In fact, common sense must be applied here, to know that perhaps this number was generated from data that had only 3 significant digits, so that you may choose to rely on only the first few significant digits of that number. And of course, this is why you are taught about that concept in school, to know what to trust, and what not to trust. Remember however - computers will generally be infinitely trusting. It is you who must apply the filter.