On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 4:20 AM, Imri Goldberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> My suggestion is to do either of the following:
> 1. Change floating point == to behave like a valid floating point
> comparison. That means using precision and some error measure.
> 2. Change floating point == to raise an exception, with an error string
> suggesting using precision comparison, or the decimal module.
>
I don't much like either of these; I think option 1 would cause
a lot of confusion and difficulty---it changes a conceptually
simple operation into something more complicated.
As for option 2., I'd agree that there are situations where having
a warning (not an exception) for floating-point equality (and
inequality) tests might be helpful; but that warning should be
off by default, or at least easily turned off.
Some Fortran compilers have such a (compile-time) warning,
I believe. But Fortran's users are much more likely to be
writing the sort of code that cares about this.
> Since this change is not backwards compatible, I suggest it be added
> only to Python 3.
>
It's already too late for Python 3.0.
>
> 3. Programmers will still need the regular ==:
> Maybe, and even then, only for very rare cases. For these, a special
> function\method might be used, which could be named floating_exact_eq.
>
I disagree with the 'very rare' here. I've seen, and written, code like:
if a == 0.0:
# deal with exceptional case
else:
b = c/a
...
or similarly, a test (a==b) before doing a division by a-b. That
one's kind of dodgy, by the way: a != b doesn't always guarantee
that a-b is nonzero, though you're okay if you're on an IEEE 754
platform and a and b are both finite numbers.
Or what if you wanted to generate random numbers in the open interval
(0.0, 1.0). random.random gives you numbers in [0.0, 1.0), so a
careful programmer might well write:
while True:
x = random.random()
if x != 0.0:
break
(A less fussy programmer might just say that the chance
of getting 0.0 is about 1 in 2**53, so it's never going to happen...)
Other thoughts:
- what should x == x do?
- what should
1.0 in set([0.0, 1.0, 2.0])
and
3.0 in set([0.0, 1.0, 2.0])
do?
Mark
_______________________________________________
Python-Dev mailing list
Python-Dev@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
Unsubscribe:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
