[Python-Dev] FP vs. tutorial (original) (raw)

Mark Hammond MarkH@ActiveState.com
Wed, 23 May 2001 18:55:17 +1000

[Tim on a subject near and dear to his testicles]

It's Real Work coming up with stuff like that. What I'm hearing is that people won't understand it anyway -- so screw it. If they want an education, they can prove it by doing a google search <0.6 wink>.

I am inclined to agree.

IMO, The Python tutorial or other documentation should include a basic example of these "errors", and a link to either of the HTML pages referenced in this thread as an optional extra.

Just enough to stop most of the "this is a bug" posts - but stopping well short of any attempt to "educate" them in floating point madness. Just one example of floats not being exact would suffice.

Going from my personal experience, I learnt long ago that floating point is not exact. That is all I needed to know to move on. I didn't like it, and I didn't understand exactly why (I thought I did, but Tim put a stop to that misconception ), but I could move on once I had that skerrick of enlightenment. And believe it or not, some of my code does use floats, and does work! (well, works as well as the rest of my code anyway )

And-it-wasn't-even-Python-that-taught-me,

Mark.