On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 6:54 AM, David Goldsmith <d.l.goldsm...@gmail.com> wrote: > Interesting thread, which leaves me wondering two things: is it documented > somewhere (e.g., at the IEEE site) precisely how many *decimal* mantissae > are representable using the 64-bit IEEE standard for float representation > (if that makes sense); and are such decimal mantissae uniformly distributed
They are definitely not uniformly distributed: that's why two numbers are close around 1 when they have only a few EPS difference, but around 1e100, you have to add quite a few EPS to even get a different number at all. That may be my audio processing background, but I like to think about float as numbers which have the same relative precision at any "level" - a kind of dB scale. If you want numbers with a fixed number of decimals, you need a fixed point representation. David _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
