On Apr 17, 7:12 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > How can I determine the smallest and largest values > of numeric types (for example int) possible in my > system? I think there exists a function for this task > but I don't know it.
This should work for ints: import sys print sys.maxint For floats, just try until it fails. This is from http://projects.amor.org/geniusql/browser/trunk/geniusql/adapters.py#l41 # Determine max binary digits for float on this system. Crude but effective. maxfloat_digits = 2 while True: L = (2 ** (maxfloat_digits + 1)) - 1 if int(float(L)) != L: break maxfloat_digits += 1 Note this will get you the number of binary digits, which is not a simple matter to translate to maximum and minimum values, since floats are inexact numerics. IEEE 754 floats are stored with one bit for the sign, some bits for the exponent (which is biased) and some for the significand. See http://babbage.cs.qc.edu/IEEE-754/32bit.html for a visual example of how it works. Robert Brewer System Architect Amor Ministries [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
