[Python-Dev] FP vs. tutorial

[Mark Hammond]

[Tim on a subject near and dear to his testicles]

> It's Real Work coming up with stuff like that.  What I'm hearing is that
> people won't understand it anyway -- so screw it.  If they want
> an education,
> they can prove it by doing a google search <0.6 wink>.

I am inclined to agree.

IMO, The Python tutorial or other documentation should include a basic
example of these "errors", and a link to _either_ of the HTML pages
referenced in this thread as an optional extra.

Just enough to stop _most_ of the "this is a bug" posts - but stopping well
short of any attempt to "educate" them in floating point madness.  Just
_one_ example of floats not being exact would suffice.

Going from my personal experience, I learnt long ago that floating point is
not exact.  That is all I needed to know to move on.  I didn't like it, and
I didn't understand exactly why (I thought I did, but Tim put a stop to that
misconception <wink>), but I could move on once I had that skerrick of
enlightenment.  And believe it or not, some of my code _does_ use floats,
and _does_ work! (well, works as well as the rest of my code anyway <wink>)

And-it-wasn't-even-Python-that-taught-me,

Mark.