Internal type conversion in Epics

[Andy Foster <ajf@ast.cam.ac.uk>]

I'm working on the International 8m Gemini Telescopes project 
which is using EPICS for software control. I recently came 
across the following problem and was wondering if anyone else
has experienced the same thing:

I have tried to pass down a double into a record which only
accepts strings. This record has been written especially for
the Gemini project and is known as a CAD record. Since
the CAD only accepts input strings, I had to do this by first
converting the double into a string using something like:

sprintf( pcad->inpa, "%0.15f", val );

Inside the routine that the CAD record calls, I had to do:

val = strtod( pcad->inpa, &c );

This worked fine but seems to be a bit of an overhead for 
passing in a double!

I had previously thought that EPICS would do this sort of conversion
automatically. However, when I tried this I found that I lost a great 
deal of accuracy in the value that I was passing in. 
For example, I tried to pass 9.564328761234322 through
the output link of a double into the CAD input field. The result after:

val = strtod( pcad->inpa, &c ); 

was 9.564330000000000. 

Is this what you would expect or am I missing something obvious
and important?

==========================================================================
Andy Foster
Royal Greenwich Observatory		Tel:    44 (0)1223 374899 (direct)
Madingley Road				E-mail: ajf@ast.cam.ac.uk
Cambridge
CB3 0HA
UK