Count Down to Zero

[Peter Hansen]

Curtis Jensen wrote:
> >>> i = 1.0
> >>> while i >= 0.0:
> ...   print i
> ...   i = i - 0.1
> ...
> 1.0
> 0.9
> 0.8
> 0.7
> 0.6
> 0.5
> 0.4
> 0.3
> 0.2
> 0.1
> 1.38777878078e-16
> >>>
> 
> The last one should be 0.0

See the other well-considered responses, which give you the background
on how your hardware and the nature of floating point representations,
not Python, is the source of your problem.  One obvious "solution" is to
do something like this:

>>> i = 10
>>> while i >= 0:
...   print i/10.0
...   i = i - 1
...
1.0
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0.0
>>>

-- 
Peter Hansen