[Pythonmac-SIG] possible bug with division operator and floating point numbers

[Richard Gordon]

> it basically worked out to 4.0/5.0 .
>which came back with the answer, "0.80000000000000004." Now I have been
>out of school for a bit, but Ilearned that should be 0.8.

Maybe this has been covered here & I missed it, but you are certainly 
correct and it's certainly strange. The same thing happens on NT, so 
it's not a Mac thing and doing 4.0/5.0 yielded .8 on Debian Linux 
running Python 1.5.2, so my conclusion is that something is broken in 
Python 2. Altho the practical consequences of an error that small 
don't seem like much to me, I'm not doing astronomy calculations or 
other things where it might matter and it suggests that some other 
stuff needs to be examined as well.


Richard Gordon
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Gordon Design
Web Design/Database Development
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