Float

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 29 Jul 2016 07:44 pm, Cai Gengyang wrote:

> Can someone explain in layman's terms what "float" means ?

Floating point number:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point

As opposed to fixed point numbers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_arithmetic

Python floats use 64 bits (approximately 18 decimal digits). Because the
decimal point can "float" from place to place, they can represent very
small numbers:

1.2345678901234567e-100

and very big numbers:

1.2345678901234567e100

using just 64 bits. If it were *fixed* decimal place, the range would be a
lot smaller: for example, suppose the decimal place was fixed after three
digits. The largest number would be 999.999999999999999 and the smallest
would be 0.000000000000001.




-- 
Steven
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.