[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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