Mysterious behavior of Precision for complex arrays

Mysterious behavior of Precision:

{{1.0+I*0.0},{0.0+I*0.0}} // SetPrecision[#,30]& // Precision // Print;

0.

{{1.0},{0.0}} // SetPrecision[#,30]& // Precision // Print;

30.


Why is the precision zero in the first instance, but not the second?

This led to some tough-to-diagnose program behaviors!

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This seems to be closely related: How to eliminate the zero real part of a purely imaginary number?. – Artes Feb 11 '14 at 0:12
+1 for minimal example of behavior. – DumpsterDoofus Feb 11 '14 at 0:30
It seems like the 0.0+I*0.0 is the culprit. Try I // SetPrecision[#, 30] & // Precision, 1 // SetPrecision[#, 30] & // Precision, 0 // SetPrecision[#, 30] & // Precision, 0.0 // SetPrecision[#, 30] & // Precision, 0.0 I // SetPrecision[#, 30] & // Precision and especially pay attention to the last two. I assume that Precision when applied to an array takes the minimum of the precisions of the elements of the array; the first element of {{1.0+I*0.0},{0.0+I*0.0}} has precision 30, whereas the second has precision 0, so the result is 0, but I'm not sure why 0.0I has precision 0. – DumpsterDoofus Feb 11 '14 at 0:35
And there's also precision Infinity: f[x_] := x // SetPrecision[#, 30] & // Precision; {f[0], f[0.0], f[0.0 + 0.0 I], f[1.0], f[1.0 I]} gives {[Infinity], [Infinity], 0., 30., 30.} – bill s Feb 11 '14 at 1:43

Not receiving an answer, the following "workaround" returns Precision as a rounded-up integer multiple of MachinePrecision:

Precision\$TNS[arg_] := arg//
Precision//
Which[
NumberQ[#] && (#>0.0),
{#},
True,
{arg}//Flatten//
Map[Precision,#]&//
Select[#,(NumberQ[#] && (#>0.0))&]&
]&//Max[#,MachinePrecision]&//
(#-1)/MachinePrecision&//Ceiling//
#*MachinePrecision&;
This workaround suffices (seemingly) for my main purpose, which is to assess and if necessary adaptively increase the precision of large-condition Real and Complex array arguments that are supplied to SingularValueDecomposition[_].

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