Builtin Float Epsilon? (was: Re: Does python suck or I am just stupid? )
Irmen de Jong
irmen at -NOSPAM-REMOVETHIS-xs4all.nl
Sat Feb 22 18:34:55 EST 2003
Erik Max Francis wrote:
> It is still surprising to me how frequently this issue is attributed to
> a problem in Python, despite being common to essentially all modern
> programming languages (those that implement floating point, anyway).
It is equally surprising to me. Though I suspect that it can be
attributed to the expectations people have about Python, being a very
high level language. Perhaps they think that such a language somehow
shields them from these low-level machine artifacts. Depending on your
point of view, this may or may not be a right expectation.
If they are working with C (for instance), which is much closer to the
machine, they are perhaps already in the right 'mindset' and sort of
expect these things to occur, and act accordingly without thinking about
the issue.
Irmen de Jong
PS. is there a language (apart from the already mentioned ABC) that
doesn't use the machine floating point datatype for floats?
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