On Tue, 1 Oct 2024 at 04:30, Dan Sommers via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote: > > But why do I need to start with the least > significant digit?
If you start from the most significant, you don't know anything about the number until you finish parsing it. There's almost nothing you can say about a number given that it starts with a particular sequence (since you don't know how MANY digits there are). However, if you know the LAST digits, you can make certain statements about it (trivial examples being whether it's odd or even). It's not very, well, significant. But there's something to it. And it extends nicely to p-adic numbers, which can have an infinite number of nonzero digits to the left of the decimal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_number ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
