Your claim is fallacious, because a floating-point value denotes a <i>range</i> of the real number line, whereas you&#x27;re insisting that, no, it stands for its <i>literal</i> value: the absolutely precise rational number that lies at the center of that range.<p>That is no more true than my current body temperature being precisely 36 4&#x2F;10 degrees Celsius because the thermometer reads 36.1.<p>All numbers in that range alias to the same double, yet  differ wildly in their decimal digits beyond the fifteenth. That &quot;long tail&quot; of digits is a meaningless residue arising from the arbitrary difference between the chosen center-of-range point and the actual number it approximates.<p>&gt; <i>Printing only 15 digits is not doing programmers any favors</i><p>Note that the ISO C function printf uses 6 digits of precision under the %g conversion specifier by default. So a team of experts can find it justifiable to severly truncate precision on printing. I find that justifiable also, like this: printing is not only for constants, and trivial expressions like 0.1 + 0.2, but for the results of complex calculations, which accumulate significant rounding errors. Six digits of precision is prudent: for many complex calculations, it will avoid misleading the user with too much precision. Fifteen decimal digits will be wrong after just a few operations; there is hardly any &quot;headroom&quot; to absorb error.<p>&gt; <i>just makes the lie even worse</i><p>If merely neglecting to reveal some aspect of the stark truth is tantamount to lying, then you&#x27;re also lying when you pull a number with 54 significant decimal figures out of a 64 bit double. Revealing some truth without an explanation can also be construed as &quot;lying&quot;, as in &quot;[N]one of woman born shall harm Macbeth&quot;.<p>I personally find it convenient that when I bang the token 0.3 into my REPL, it comes back with a tidy 0.3. I know that there are several values of double which will print as 0.3, and don&#x27;t compare with exact equality except in special circumstances (like when deliberately using integral values not far from zero).