On 10/21/19 4:36 PM, doganad...@gmail.com wrote: > On Monday, October 21, 2019 at 4:09:23 PM UTC+3, Piet van Oostrum wrote: >> Piet van Oostrum <pie...@vanoostrum.org> writes: >> >>> doganad...@gmail.com writes: >>> >>>> I dont know much about scala actually. I have just have tried to give >>>> 0.0001 and it returned a presentation with an 'e' .whereas python takes >>>> 0.0001 and gives 0.0001 . it made me think python is better in that >>>> specific subject. >>>> >>>> However, python though starts to give 'e' number when 5 decimals are >>>> given as input. Although there can be systems around which are better in >>>> this subject other things I can achieve in python overrides some >>>> disadvantages. >>> Yes, I would say Python is more user-friendly in this particular >>> example, although both outputs are correct. If I remember correctly, >>> Python had an update in the area several years ago to make the output >>> for floating-point numbers more user-friendly, (and at the same time >>> maybe even more correct). >>> >>> But these are just choices of the implementers of the language, not >>> characteristics of the language itself. >> In Python 0.00001 => 1e-05, so it just chooses a different point to >> switch from pure decimal to scientific notation. >> -- >> Pieter van Oostrum <pie...@vanoostrum.org> >> WWW: http://piet.vanoostrum.org/ >> PGP key: [8DAE142BE17999C4] > > They ought to have a reason to make the program switch from pure decimal to > scientific notation representation. I don't know that reason. Getting along > with it.
The basic reason is readability. A number like 0.0000000000000001 is obviously fairly hard to read a see exactly what the value is. A number like 0.1 isn't. So somewhere you need to change from fixed point to exponential notation. A common criteria is about when the fixed point number takes more space to represent than the exponential. 1.2E-05 takes 7 characters, 0.000015 takes 8 so the exponential is shorter. As an aside, I would be very leery of numbers like 0.00001 or 1e-05 as they only show 1 significant digit, so unless I have good reason to believe that they are exact numbers, I would have concern of them being very imprecise, and possibly just noise. -- Richard Damon -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
