I'm not a c compiler expert, but have a look at double precision pi It may be the difference between computational precision and "%Lf" display precision. I started looking into it, when I questioned the way GLib defined pi as a constant. They defined it out to 50 decimal places, but any use of it in it's long double is limited to 15 decimal places.

One of the c gurus in that thread said that c's precision is only gauranteed to 10 decimal places, but with IEEE standards, it's common to see 15. I see 15.

Eventually, I found mpfr which lets you set how many digits of precision you want to use.

If you can show me a simple c program that computes and displays values out to 50 decimal places, with normal c, I would be greatful. Everything I see truncates it (pi) to 3.(15 decimal places).

For example, in this code, the value of pi is correctly printed as a string on the first line of output, but the subsequent lines all have garbage after the 15th decimal place.

#include <gtk/gtk.h>
/* gcc -o test test.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0` */

int  main (){ 
/* how the headers define G_PI */
/* #define G_PI   3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751 
+ 
*/

 long double PI = G_PI;

g_print("3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751\n");
g_print("%0.50e\n",G_PI);
g_print("%0.50Lf\n",G_PI);
g_print("%0.50Lf\n",PI);
g_print("%0.50Lg\n",PI);
g_print("%0.50Le\n",PI);
  
return 0; 
}
[download]

Output:

                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^ ->  unstable after 15 dec
+imal 
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751
3.14159265358979311599796346854418516159057617187500e+00
-0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
3.14159265358979311599796346854418516159057617187500
3.141592653589793115997963468544185161590576171875
3.14159265358979311599796346854418516159057617187500e+00
                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^ -> unstable after 15 dec
+imal
[download]

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