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From: mcgrath@saffron.Berkeley.EDU (Roland McGrath)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: %g format in printf
Message-ID: 
Date: 6 Sep 89 00:53:35 GMT
References: <1439@hiatus.dec.com>
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In-reply-to: daniels@grue.dec.com's message of 5 Sep 89 23:19:47 GMT

In article <1439@hiatus.dec.com> daniels@grue.dec.com (Bradford R. Daniels) writes:

   What should the default number of significant digits be for the
   %g format specifier in printf?  The standard says that an explicit
   0 should be treated as a 1, but doesn't say anything about what to
   do if no precision is specified.

   Right now, the VAX C RTL uses 6 as the default precision.  This
   seems reasonable, since 6 is the default precision for the %e
   and %f specifiers.  However, precision has a different meaning
   with %g than with those other specifiers.  Is VAXCRTL's current
   behavior correct?

Yes.  The ANSI standard does specify that the default precision is 6.
--
	Roland McGrath
	Free Software Foundation, Inc.
roland@ai.mit.edu, uunet!ai.mit.edu!roland