-findit precision- will point you to several useful FAQs. Yes, a
double will allow you to represent numbers up to 10^307. But that
does not mean that you can have an arbitrary number of digits of
precision in the representation of that number, as the FAQs discuss.
You cannot represent integers with more than a certain number of
binary digits of precision, which then translates into a certain
number of decimal digits which can be held exactly: about 7 for a
float, about 15 for a double. But to avoid worrying about these
problems, just store integer IDs as strings of appropriate length.
Kit
Kit Baum, Boston College Economics and DIW Berlin
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata:
http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html
On May 15, 2008, at 02:33 , statalist-digest wrote:
>
> If double can't deal with 16 digits number, what does the help mean by
> saying it can store up to 8.9884656743*10^307?
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* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
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