lambda with floats

[Patrick Maupin]

On Apr 9, 1:22 pm, monkeys paw <mon... at joemoney.net> wrote:
> On 4/9/2010 3:43 AM, Bas wrote:
>
> > On Apr 7, 6:15 am, Patrick Maupin<pmau... at gmail.com>  wrote:
> >> I should stop making a habit of responding to myself, BUT.  This isn't
> >> quite an acre in square feet.  I just saw the 43xxx and assumed it
> >> was, and then realized it couldn't be, because it wasn't divisible by
> >> 10.  (I used to measure land with my grandfather with a 66 foot long
> >> chain, and learned at an early age that an acre was 1 chain by 10
> >> chains, or 66 * 66 * 10 = 43560 sqft.)
> >> That's an exact number, and 208 is a poor approximation of its square
> >> root.
>
> > There is no need to remember those numbers for the imperially
> > challenged people:
>
> > In [1]: import scipy.constants as c
>
> scipy.constants ??
>
> doesn't work for me.
>
>
>
> > In [2]: def acre2sqft(a):
> >     ...:     return a * c.acre / (c.foot * c.foot)
> >     ...:
>
> > In [3]: acre2sqft(1)
> > Out[3]: 43560.0
>
> > Cheers,
> > Bas
>
>

Basically, he's saying that, instead of remembering the very simple
"66" and "10" values, you can download and install a multi-megabyte
gzipped tar file for the scipy project. ;-)

(Of course, you get a few nice functions thrown in for free along with
your constants, but downloading scipy for its constants is like
choosing a sports car for its cupholders.)