Why not FP for Money?

[Michael Hoffman]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> danb_83 at yahoo.com (Dan Bishop) writes:
> 
>>str(x), however, is meant to return a "nice" string representation,
>>and so it only uses '%.12g' % x (ignoring 5 "noise" digits at the end
>>of repr(x)).
> 
> Thanks.  I didn't realize that 'nice' means 'inaccurate':

No, in this case, "nice" means "less precise." You frequently cannot get 
the kind of accuracy in floating point numbers that you seem to want.

>     >>> a=1e12+1
>     >>> b=a-1e12
>     >>> b
>     1.0
>     >>> str(a)
>     '1e+12'
>     >>> float(str(a))-1e12
>     0.0

If you had chosen different values, you would have gotten differing 
results even without a str/float conversion:

 >>> a=1e11+0.1
 >>> b=a-1e11
 >>> b
0.100006103515625
 >>> str(a)
'100000000000.0'
 >>> float(str(a))-0.1
99999999999.899994
 >>> 0.1
0.10000000000000001

Fun!
--
Michael Hoffman