float literal too large

[Tim Peters]

[posted & mailed]

> I just wrote a python program to read output produced by a Fortran
> program that somebody had written.  Much to my surprise I got the
> exception:
>
> float() literal too large.
>
> The literal in question was '0.23489798479873E-2325' (this was
> generated on a Cray computer).  I couldn't find anything in the
> documentation about this restriction.  Even more puzzling was the fact
> that eval() worked just fine (it gave the answer 0.0 which is
> perfectly acceptable to me, given that the platform on which I was
> running had less precision than the platform that generated it).  ...
> ...
> I'm running:
>
> Python 1.5.2 (#4, Nov 23 1999, 14:57:03)  [GCC 2.7.2.2] on sunos5

This inconsistency in 1.5.2 was inherited from the differing behaviors of
atof and strtod in your glibc.  It should be fixed for you in 1.6; e.g., but
under WinTel  (which also used to display the inconsistency in 1.5.2) 1.6a2:

C:\Python16>python
Python 1.6a2 (#0, Apr  6 2000, 11:45:12) [MSC 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
Copyright 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam
>>> float(0.23489798479873E-2325)
0.0
>>> eval("0.23489798479873E-2325")
0.0
>>> x = 0.23489798479873E-2325
>>> x
0.0
>>>