[daip] AIPS / POPS numerical precision
Walter Brisken
wbrisken at aoc.nrao.edu
Fri Oct 22 22:08:45 EDT 2004
After spending some time trying to understand why two of my coordinates
didn't match after moving one of them (CLCOR), I came to the conclusion
that the aips command interpreter is likely using low precision (32 bit
floats) in its calculations. I discovered it when calculating:
>print 51.052246-51.052300
AIPS 1: -0.00005341
whereas my handy python interpreter gives the more correct value
>>> 51.052246-51.052300
-5.4000000005771653e-05
Would it be too much trouble to promote the internals of POPS to
double-precision? Until then I will have to do these simple calculations
elsehow.
Thanks,
Walter
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