>From a numerical standpoint, floats shouldn't generally be compared using
equality. I came across a bug at work yesterday where I had written:
if not delta:
return 0.0
where delta was a floating point number. After a series of calculations
piling up round-off error delta took on a value on the order of 1e-8. Not
zero, but it should have been. The fix was easy enough:
if abs(delta) < EPSILON:
return 0.0
for a suitable value of EPSILON.
That got me to thinking... I'm sure I have plenty of other similar mistakes
in my code. (Never was much of a numerical analysis guy...) What if there
was a picky-float setting that generated warnings if you compared two floats
using "==" (or implicitly using "not")? Does that make sense to try for
testing purposes? The implementation seemed straightforward enough:
http://python.org/sf/1478364
I'm sure at the very least the idea needs more thought than I've given it.
It's just a half-baked idea at this point.
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