PPC floating equality vs. byte compilation

[Donn Cave]

I ran into a phenomenon that seemed odd to me, while testing a
build of Python 2.4.1 on BeOS 5.04, on PowerPC 603e.

test_builtin.py, for example, fails a couple of tests with errors
claiming that apparently identical floating point values aren't equal.
But it only does that when imported, and only when the .pyc file
already exists.  Not if I execute it directly (python test_builtin.py),
or if I delete the .pyc file before importing it and running test_main().

For now, I'm going to just write this off as a flaky build.  I would
be surprised if 5 people in the world care, and I'm certainly not one
of them.  I just thought someone might find it interesting.

The stalwart few who still use BeOS are mostly using Intel x86 hardware,
as far as I know, but the first releases were for PowerPC, at first
on their own hardware and then for PPC Macs until Apple got nervous
and shut them out of the hardware internals.  They use a Metrowerks
PPC compiler that of course hasn't seen much development in the last
6 years, probably a lot longer.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com