Why the nonsense number appears?

[Ben O'Steen]

On Mon, October 31, 2005 9:39, Sybren Stuvel said:
> Johnny Lee enlightened us with:
>> Why are there so many nonsense tails? thanks for your help.
>
> Because if the same reason you can't write 1/3 in decimal:
>
> http://docs.python.org/tut/node16.html
>
> Sybren
> --
> The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a
> capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the
> safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
>                                              Frank Zappa
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>


I think that the previous poster was asking something different. I think
he was asking something like this:

If

>>> t1 = 0.500
>>> t2 = 0.461
>>> print t1-t2
0.039

Then why:

>>> t1 += 12345678910
>>> t2 += 12345678910
>>> # Note, both t1 and t2 have been incremented by the same amount.
>>> print t1-t2
0.0389995574951

It appears Yu-Xi Lim beat me to the punch. Using decimal as opposed to
float sorts out this error as floats are not built to handle the size of
number used here.

Ben