Hi, I was about to open an issue on github, but thought it was better to start a discussion here instead.
Pd uses the default settings for %g to display numbers in comments, message boxes, number boxes and [print] (and some other stuff, but this is what concerns me). The default precision is "6" (as in "%.6g").
I'm sure this probably has been discussed many times, but even for single precision, this is not satisfactory and we can create numbers in Pd that it can understand, but it can't save them. Let's leave that aside for now, the thing is that I think this could really change and improve for pd64, as such a precision really does seem quite restrictive to me in this case.
It should be easy to adapt the code and have a different precision for each case, right?
I can also think of a preference settings that the user can set himself.
What do you think?
cheers
I encountered this issue recently when someone came on our forum claiming something was wrong with their analog input signals, whereas these were numbers printed by Pd in scientific notation format. They didn't realise that and thought those were big voltage spikes in the analog signal. To make things worse, the situation quickly escalated and they went to ChatGPT which suggested to clip the input range to get rid of the weird prints https://forum.bela.io/d/5315-noise-on-analog-inputs (...).
On Bela, we deal with analog inputs for sensors, so small values close to zero are pretty common when you put together electric noise and sampling noise. Even if someone can parse them properly, it's pretty awkward to see, so I was coincidentally looking for something very similar to Alexandre's proposal. I concur it would be nice to increase the number of digits that it is allowed to stay in the decimal notation, and/or make it user-settable.
Best, Giulio
Alexandre Torres Porres wrote on 25/11/2024 11:55:
The thing is that a higher precision in single precision will give you many float imprecision errors and it's also annoying.
I guess using %g is a good compromise for single precision in messages, objects (as arguments) and comments. Maybe being able to set with more versatility would be nice in an object like [print], or as a new parameter for the number boxes. Or I can try and create externals that deal with this for power users, I don't know...
But at least a hardcoded higher precision makes sense in general for pd64. I don't know yet which one would be good and others here may know better. And I think that a highger precision by default would deal with your issue Giulio, right?
cheers
Em seg., 25 de nov. de 2024 às 19:53, Giulio Moro giuliomoro@yahoo.it escreveu: