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You lost me on this one. :(

There is the odd case of trailing zeroes in non decimal numbers, but otherwise if a number is written, when is that not assumed to be significant?

That is, there are fairly standard rules for conveying significant digits, I thought?

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Whenever you've not personally done the error propagation and rounding yourself you shouldn't assume someone else has done it for you, and you should check if they have before trusting it.

For example, the number you are viewing could have been produced with finite precision floating point math and then just rounded to an arbitrary chosen (small) number of digits.

I mean... I don't disagree with this statement. But there are norms on how you are supposed to write numbers with significant digits.

Sure, but there is no typographical convention for how to indicate that a number is following such a norm so you can never tell from the number alone.

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