Signed zeros: is this a bug?

[jim-on-linux]

#########
>
> Interesting.  So on Windows there's probably no
> hope of what I want to do working.
> But on a platform where the C library does the
> right thing with signed zeros, this
> behaviour is still a little surprising.  I
> guess what's happening is that there's
> some optimization that avoids creating two
> separate float objects for a float literal
> that appears twice, and that optimization
> doesn't see the difference between 0. and -0.
>
> >>> x, y = 0., -0.
> >>> id(x) == id(y)
>
> True
>
> jim-on-linux's solution works in the
> interpreter, but not in a script, presumably
> because we've got file-wide optimization rather
> than line-by-line optimization.
>
> #test.py
> x = -0.0
> y = 0.0
> print x, y
> #end test.py
>
> >>> import test
>
> -0.0 -0.0
>
> Mark


This is the only way I could make this work in a 
script.

from decimal import Decimal

x = Decimal( "-0.0")
y= Decimal("0.0")
print x,y


x = Decimal( "0.0")
y= Decimal("-0.0")
print x,y



jim-on-linux
http:\\www.inqvista.com