[Python-Dev] Caching float(0.0) (original) (raw)

Tim Hochberg tim.hochberg at ieee.org
Mon Oct 2 19:43:51 CEST 2006

skip at pobox.com wrote:/

Steve> By these statistics I think the answer to the original question Steve> is clearly "no" in the general case.

As someone else (Guido?) pointed out, the literal case isn't all that interesting. I modified floatobject.c to track a few interesting floating point values: [...code...] So for a largely non-floating point "application", a fair number of floats are allocated, a bit over 25% of them are -1.0, 0.0 or +1.0, and nearly 50% of them are whole numbers between -10.0 and 10.0, inclusive. Seems like it at least deserves a serious look. It would be nice to have the numeric crowd contribute to this subject as well.

As a representative of the numeric crowd, I'll say that I've never noticed this to be a problem. I suspect that it's a non issue since we generally store our numbers in arrays, not big piles of Python floats, so there's no opportunity for identical floats to pile up.

-tim

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