Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: > On 25 Feb 2007 05:31:11 -0800, "John Machin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > declaimed the following in comp.lang.python: > >> Evidently not; here's some documentation we both need(ed) to read: >> >> http://docs.python.org/tut/node16.html >> """ >> Almost all machines today (November 2000) use IEEE-754 floating point >> arithmetic, and almost all platforms map Python floats to IEEE-754 >> "double precision". >> """ >> I'm very curious to know what the exceptions were in November 2000 and >> if they still exist. There is also the question of how much it matters > > Maybe a few old Vaxes/Alphas running OpenVMS... Those machines had > something like four or five different floating point representations (F, > D, G, and H, that I recall -- single, double, double with extended > exponent range, and quad)
I actually used Python on an Alpha running OpenVMS a few years ago. IIRC, the interpreter was built with IEEE floating point types rather than the other types. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list