> + Yes, I'm serious about not including tutorial examples with > platform-dependent output, unless they're explicitly meant to > illustrate non-portable code. Sure. Most examples can be rewritten to avoid platform-dependent output. But there should be one section on floating-point inaccuracies that shows a few of the kind of things you can expect on a typical platform, and 1.1 -> 1.1000000000000001 is pretty common. > + Specific small examples notwithstanding, there is no uniformity > across platforms in the last digit or so, because not even the IEEE- > 754 standard requires that (while C is much sloppier than 754), and > vendors generally don't implement anything better than the minimum > necessary when it comes to f.p. (Sun is a notable exception). So we'll have to add something like "the actual inexact output you see may differ from the inexact output in this example". > + Happy to add text explaining the existence of surprises, and > providing a URL. Do the floating-point morons <wink> on Python-Dev > find this one comprehensible?: > > http://www.lahey.com/float.htm I was thinking more of immortalizing this one: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/RepresentationError This can serve as a nice self-contained section on f.p. surprises. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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