[Dick Moores] > ... > But isn't there a PRECISE answer to my question?
Of course ;-) > Or is it OT? Well, it's really more a question about your machine's floating-point hardware than about Python. Good explanations of exact limits for IEEE-754 floating-point hardware can be found many places on the web. Does it really help to know that, e.g., for an 8-byte IEEE double, the largest representable finite positive value is exactly (2**53-1)*2**971? BTW, the best way to manipulate "exact" values like this is via math.ldexp: >>> math.ldexp(2**53-1, 971) # largest finite positive double 1.7976931348623157e+308 >>> math.ldexp(2**53, 971) # add 1 to the mantissa and it's "too big" Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> OverflowError: math range error _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
