The main factor determining the precision of KCalc is whether your libc and libmath
supports the C data type long double. If this is the case, KCalc will detect this
at compile time and use it as its fundamental data type to represent numbers.
Check KCalc's About dialog (in the
Configure dialog box) in order to find out what the
fundamental data type for your copy of KCalc is. Unless you have a libc and libmath of exceptionally high quality, you will
be able to observe some “interesting” results when trying
to execute computations such as: 123.22 - 123.21 ,
2.01 - 2 , 123.88 - 123.87 and
similar. However if you think this is bad I ask you to do the same computation
on the calculator provided with Windows®. Adjust the Precision in KCalc's
Configure dialog so that the above computations
work correctly. I recommend a precision of 14 if the fundamental data type
for your copy of KCalc is long double, otherwise 8 or 10. Higher precision doesn't necessarily lead to better results. Play with
the precision and you will see what I mean. |