setting format in workspace view

Double clicking on a workspace variable brings up a window with 3 tabs: PLOTS, VARIABLE and VIEW. Clicking the VIEW tab brings up a drop down menu to set the variable format, default is "short fixed decimal". The format "long fixed decimal" does not seem to work as I would expect, it shows more decimal places but in scientific notation - just like "long scientific notation". Is there a setting I am missing to produce the expected behavior?

Answer 1

[David Fletcher]

It probably occurs when the number becomes too large or too small to be represented by the long fixed decimal format. It will also tend to happen with floating point numbers when they cannot be represented exactly - instead you will get the number+/-eps (see the docs on floating point relative accuracy)

[Leslie Deck]

Hmm, that's unfortunate. Its mainly an annoyance, since I now always need to look for an exponent.