Zbyszek Szmek <zbys...@in.waw.pl> added the comment: On 03/10/2012 12:26 PM, Mark Dickinson wrote: > > Mark Dickinson<dicki...@gmail.com> added the comment: > > Proposed rewrite:
Hi, thanks for the quick reply. If we were to rewrite the whole entry, some more changes could be done: I think it would be useful to mention explicitly that Python simply uses the native floating-point implementation in hardware and thus behaves very similarly to other languages which do this, for instance C or Java. This should clear up a lot of the behaviour for people who know other programming languages. "how the underlying platform handles floating-point" says something very similar, but the reader needs to understand what the "underlying platform" exactly is. It is easy to count, that exactly 17 digits are accurate. I have to admit, that I'm completely lost here --- why would a vastly inaccurate number (with more than half of digits wrong) be ever stored? If "1.2" is converted to a float (a C double in current implementation), it has 15.96 decimal digits of precision. "Similarly, the result of a floating-point operation must be rounded to fit into the fixed precision, often resulting in another tiny error." ? ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue14245> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
