Re: ICU Proposal: change to scientific number format behavior

What does the value of 1 for maximum integer digits really mean?  The 
maximum integer digits won't affect the exponent digits, right?  Can you 
give an example?

Will this change prevent me from setting the maximum number of integer 
digits to something like 20?  If I format a 64-bit number, there are times 
that I will want to format the complete precision of that number (both 
with integer and scientific notation).

George Rhoten
IBM Globalization Center of Competency/ICU  San José, CA, USA




Doug Felt <[email protected]>
Sent by: [email protected]
10/23/2003 04:56 PM
 
        To:     [email protected]
        cc: 
        Subject:        ICU Proposal: change to scientific number format 
behavior


This proposal affects both ICU4J and ICU4C.  Please comment by Oct 31, 
2003.

In DecimalFormat, setScientificNotation(true) currently changes the state 
of
the formatter slightly-- it ensures that the minimum number of exponent 
digits
is at least 1.  Although it makes this change, it does not make other 
changes--
for example, it does not ensure that the maximum number of integer digits 
is a
reasonable number.  The problem with this (see jb2552) is that using a
formatter with a high maximum outputs text with a large number of 0's.

This proposal is to change the behavior of setScientificNotation in two 
ways:
1) no longer change the state of the formatter representing the number of
exponent digits (though it will continue to behave as though the minumum 
is 1)
2) if the maximum number of integer digits is > 8, behave as though the 
maximum
is 1.

This will allow a single call to setScientificNotation(true) to produce a
formatter that formats numbers in a reasonable manner, and will ensure 
that a
subsequent call to setScientificNotation(false) restores the original
formatter.  The value 8 was chosen as a reasonable upper limit for people 
using
exponential notation.

Other than the implementation change, the only API change is the following
documentation change to setScientificNotation:

/**
* <strong><font face=helvetica color=red>NEW</font></strong>
* Set whether or not scientific notation is used.  When scientific
notation
* is used, the effective maximum number of integer digits is <= 8.  If the
* maximum number of integer digits is set to more than 8, the effective
* maximum will be 1.  This allows this call to generate a 'default'
* scientific number format without additional changes.
[...]
*/


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