Floating point precision is laughably innacurate.

There is code out there for rotating a texture on an object. It looked something like:

float rot = 0.0;

while (rot = rot + 0.1) {
  if (rot = 10.1) {
    rot = 0.0;
    llDoTheRotationEtcEtcEtc(rot, etc);
  } 
}

This is pretty much an unbounded loop, for if
you print the values of rot you'll see stray numbers
appear after the 1st decimal point rather quickly.

But perhaps that is a bad example.

Consider this other example, one where we try to pretty-print (aka trimming off most of the garbage decimal places) the coords of a vector by multiplying, llRound()'ing and dividing: (Note that I haven't tested this exact code, but it illustrates something similar to what I had been trying to do in-world.

float x = 57.234323;  // we pretend this is some x coord
                                  // as returned by say llGetPos()

x =  llRound(x * 100) / 100.0 ;
llSay(0, "x is " + (string)x);

Do you have a guess about what this printed out? Did you perhaps guess it would print out 57.23? That would be my guess. Unfortunately, in that one division by 100.0 we accrue .000007 in error so our pretty-printing fails and we end up with 57.229993 (or was it 57.230007?)

Can the environment's floating precision be improved?

Well darn I left the / out of the first [/code]... and I can't see the edit button to change the main post....

Edit: ah found the main post's edit button ... was shot way out to the right because of the formatting

Always always always use a delta (or as scientists call it, "fudge factor" when comparing floating point numbers, never never ever depend on the value of a floating point being exact.

For example, this is bad

for (x = 0.0; x != 10.0; x += 0.1)

and this is good (well, "ok", "good" would not use a float in a loop counter)

for (x = 0.0; x < 10.0; x+=0.1)

This is more a property of how floating point numbers are stored rather than any inaccuracy of the simulator. We just have to take this in to account when writing our scripts.

As for pretty-printing, you would probably do better with string manipulation ie:

llWhisper(0, llGetSubString((string)27.7777777, 0, 4));