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by lwerdna 1792 days ago
When you accuse someone of being wrong, it's helpful to provide justification, not insults.

Y: How do I strip unnecessary symbols after a decimal point?

X: How do I round a number to a desired precision?

It looks like the perfect example of XY problem to me. Please tell me how I'm confused.

1 comments

Your Y is not a different problem, it's just a poorly worded description of X.

In an XY-problem situation, X and Y are different problems.

They are different problems. Stripping the final character from "3.14159" does not produce the same result as rounding to 3.1416.

The first action concerns a syntactic property of PI's decimal representation while the second action concerns a semantic property of PI's value.

A related example given on https://xyproblem.info is a user asking (Y) how to extract the final 3 characters of a filename string when he probably intends to ask (X) how to retrieve a filename's extension.