[Python-Dev] Expert floats (original) (raw)

Dennis Allison allison at sumeru.stanford.EDU
Tue Mar 30 14:54:16 EST 2004

Did I miss the issue here?

Floating point represetnations are a problem because for some decimal representations coverting the decimal form to binary and then back to decimal does not (necessarily) return the same value. There's a large literature on this problem and known solutions. (See, for example Guy Steele's paper on printing floating point.)

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Dan Sugalski wrote:

At 2:40 PM -0500 3/30/04, Tim Peters wrote: >[Josiah Carlson] > > That is, Python uses the 8-byte FP, not the (arguably worthless) 4-bit >> FP. > >I believe all Python platforms use some flavor of 8-byte float.

Don't be too sure. I've seen the VMS version getting thumped lately--someone may well be using X floats there. (which are 16 byte floats) -- Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai dan at sidhe.org have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk

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