[Python-ideas] PEP 485: A Function for testing approximate equality (original) (raw)

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Fri Feb 6 02:00:17 CET 2015

On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 11:56 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 4:40 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> If we really believe that almost all people will be working with numbers > of > around a magnitude of 1, then we could set a default -- by why in the > world > are you using floating point numbers with a range of about 1e-300 to > 1e300 > in that case? Because 'float' is the one obvious way to handle non-integral numbers in Python. If you simply put "x = 1.1" in your code, you get a float, Fair enough -- more to the point -- we HAVE floats because we want folks to be able to use a wide range of values -- once we have that, we can't count on users generally only using a small part of that range.

Right. So crafting default tolerances for any particular "expected range" isn't particularly safe.

+1 for the current behaviour of not specifying absolute tolerance.

ChrisA

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