On Sun, 10 Aug 2008 16:34:34 -0400, Rob Clewley wrote: > Dear Pythonistas, > > How many times have we seen posts recently along the lines of "why is it > that 0.1 appears as 0.10000000000000001 in python?" that lead to posters > being sent to the definition of the IEEE 754 standard and the decimal.py > module? I am teaching an introductory numerical analysis class this > fall, and I realized that the best way to teach this stuff is to be able > to play with the representations directly ... > Consequently, I have written a module to simulate the machine > representation of binary floating point numbers and their arithmetic. > Values can be of arbitrary fixed precision or infinite precision, along > the same lines as python's in-built decimal class. The code is here: > http://www2.gsu.edu/~matrhc/binary.html
I would be interested to look at that, if I can find the time. Is this related to minifloats? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minifloat -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list