Does python suck or I am just stupid?

[David Eppstein]

In article <41948401.0302221000.6257443f at posting.google.com>,
 andy at takecover.net (Andy Mroczkowski) wrote:

> I've been tearing my hair out over a bug(?) I've come across.  I've
> only been programming in Python for a few months so I'm no expert. 
> I've seen the same behavior in Python2.2 on several different
> machines.  Instead of banging my head against the wall even more, I
> thought I would ask the community for help.

This is not a problem with the language, and the same thing would happen 
if you wrote that code in any other language.  It's a problem with your 
understanding of floating point arithmetic.

One of the better discussions of what floating point means and how it 
works turns out to be in the Python docs:
http://www.python.org/doc/current/tut/node14.html
For a little more technical detail, see http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/goldberg91what.html

But the basic issue here is, floating point numbers are not infinitely 
precise, so you can't expect == to work with two floats that were 
computed by two different expressions.

-- 
David Eppstein                      http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science