Presently, I am working on a scientific application, and have been creating some data tables. A request was made to me to ensure that some data columns be rounded to 3 significant figures e.g.

10.1234 becomes 10.1

10.7335 becomes 10.7

1.1003 becomes 1.10

I thought through this request with nonchalance at first, but was surprised just how difficult and time consuming it turned out to be to fulfil. After trying out many examples on the interwebs, including some lengthy code libraries, the solution was simplicity itself, using the .NET string format modifier G0 where the number after G is the number of significant figures desired,  so

Console.WriteLine((10.12345).ToString(“G3”));

Will give you a result of 10.1

This works fine and as expected, but the bug is when you have 10.0, what is output to screen is 10

After traipsing through numerous articles, the result was that this behaviour was “by design”. After communicating this “by design” feature to my boss (and numerous scientists), their retort was that it was a bug and ought to be corrected. The reason why they were so annoyed was because the missing trailing zero indicates a level of accuracy that is an unacceptable omission in their field, thus I was advised to prefer two decimal places instead.

One of the first rules you are taught as a new programmer, is that numbers in computer programs are zero based i.e. you start counting at zero because zero is a number, so why in this case are the .NET framework designers ignoring the zero? One must say that one concurs with this being a bug, and wish the framework library team could correct this behaviour, to save developers polluting their codebases with conversions to strings and back to numbers, just so one can present data in a way that is meaningful to mathematically based users.