Adaptive number of significant digits

[sharkdp]

or at least: support for high-precision integer computations

for more details, see previous discussion here: sharkdp/insect#54

[archisman-panigrahi]

Given how the code is written right now, is it nontrivial to change the behavior to the following?

Calculate and store variables with high precision (as far as machine precision allows) but show only 6 significant digits

[sharkdp]

Calculate and store variables with high precision (as far as machine precision allows) but show only 6 significant digits

This is what we do already.

[philippotto]

Another example to motivate this issue: I just did my taxes (yay) and used numbat for some simple additions. This simplified output caught me a bit off-guard:

  10000 euro + 0.95 euro

    = 10001 €    [Money]

Especially, when dealing with currencies, it seems intuitive to me to render two digits after the dot (unless it's 0). However, I often omit the units if the calculation only involves a single unit type. Therefore, special casing currencies wouldn't have helped me much. Instead, I would love to see some logic à la "render the result with the same precision that was used in the input".

My suggestion probably over-simplifies things, but maybe it's still somehow helpful.

[septatrix]

I wanted to calculate the downtime of some services and was confused that nine nines (99.9999999% uptime) was showed as 100%:

>>> 1year * (1-99.9999999%) -> ms

  1 year × (1 - 100 percent) ➞ millisecond

      = 31.5569 ms    [Time]