In article <3C83F30C.AB4C24FA@yahoo.com.au> , Mark James Lewin 
<m_j### [at] yahoocomau>  wrote:

> Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I would have liked was a statement
> that tells the user the maximum number of dp POV stores for floats (it's, as
> Warp said, around 15 or 16).

This is not about "maximum number of dp POV stores for floats".
Floating-point numbers are "stored" by your processor.  POV-Ray doesn't have
any (real) influence regarding precision.  And there is no exact limit for
floating-point precision, only a common upper bound for which precision is
guaranteed.  You can read this up in your processor's reference manual and
some international standard specifications if you really want to.  The POV-Ray
manual simply cannot make any statement about what you are looking for because
the rules are not as simple or general as you expect nor should you be
concerned about them:

Instead of asking how much precision you can get, you should ask how much
precision you _need_!  In very few cases you will need more than five or six
decimal places when it comes to computer graphics, so what would be the point
in outputting more than you really need? -- Get the idea?

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich
e-mail: mac### [at] povrayorg

I am a member of the POV-Ray Team.
Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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