[Python-ideas] PEP 485: A Function for testing approximate equality

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:39 AM, Andrew Barnert
<abarnert at yahoo.com.dmarc.invalid> wrote:
> If assertAlmostEqual is primarily intended for float comparisons, and it
> really is misleadingly bad for that use,

Since I was complaining about assertAlmostEqual, I should probably say
explicitly what I don't like:

It has two arguments for specifying precision: "places", which is
measured in decimal digits, and "delta", which is an absolute
tolerance like the ones we've discussed here. The fact that this pair
of options exists, and the fact that relative precision is very very
frequently talked about in terms of "significant digits", strongly
suggests to me that these are the two settings for relative and
absolute tolerances, and setting places=7 means that the numbers
should match up to 7 significant digits.

However, this is not what places=7. In fact, if 'places' is specified,
then it means we set the absolute tolerance to 5 * 10**(-places - 1).

So the problems are:
- This is confusing/misleading/surprising.

- There is no support for relative tolerances, which are almost always
what you want -- using the same tolerances for comparing two numbers
in the millions and for comparing two numbers in the millionths is
going to lead to ugly results.

- Because there is no support for relative tolerances, the defaults
are wildly inappropriate unless the numbers being compared happen to
be of normal size, like say between 10**-2 and 10**2. The docs don't
warn about this. And in fact if you want to get a useful result when
comparing two large numbers, you actually have to assert that they are
the same to some negative number of decimal places. Technically this
can be worked out from docstring (it references round(), and round()
is documented to accept a negative ndigits argument), but it's very
surprising and obscure.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith
Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh
http://vorpus.org