topic Re: Value of a E number in SAS Programming

Value of a E number

ArchanaSudhir — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 18:03:23 GMT

Hi,

What is the actual value of 1.534386E-17?

Re: Value of a E number

Reeza — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 18:43:04 GMT

Re: Value of a E number

Reeza — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 18:50:32 GMT

FYI - this is scientific notation so it translates to

1.534x10^-17

https://www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/scientific-notation.html

Re: Value of a E number

ArchanaSudhir — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 19:04:44 GMT

Thanks, that helps! 🙂

Re: Value of a E number

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 08:20:06 GMT

Although @Reeza's post is rather terse, he is probably spot-on to the problem. Numbers in that range are often encountered when the internal representation of numbers in SAS (8-byte real) causes problems stemming from the decimal-to-binary conversion (ie 0.1 cannot be correctly stored as a binary number).

In such cases, apply the round() function to get rid of inaccuracies happening far to the right of the decimal point.