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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see that:

    julia> BigFloat(1.0) |> typeof
    BigFloat

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The problem isn't the type, it's the bits. If you convert from Float64, you'll get garbage bits once you go past the bits determined by float64:

    julia> BigFloat(1.1)
    1.100000000000000088817841970012523233890533447265625

I'd recommend using the big string macro though isntead of converting explictly from a string:

    julia> big"1.1"
    1.100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003

Oh, I see. Thank you.

(And, in Julia’s defense, this is all spelled out in the documentation, immediately accessible from the REPL. I just never read it carefully enough.)

> And, in Julia’s defense, this is all spelled out in the documentation, immediately accessible from the REPL. I just never read it carefully enough.

My concern is most physicists won't read that either and may not even notice the loss of precision until it's too late (after a paper has been published).

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