On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Mark Dickinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 8:02 PM, Guido van Rossum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Now that I've learned about the hex float format supported by C++ and
>> Java, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to support conversion to and
>> from that format and nothing else.
>>
>> E.g.
>>
>>>>> math.tohex(3.14)
>> '0x1.91eb851eb851fp+1'
>>>>> math.fromhex('0x1.91eb851eb851fp+1')
>> 3.1400000000000001
>
> This would certainly be enough for me, though I think there's still
> some educational value in having binary output available. But
> that's just a matter of substituting a four-bit binary string for
> each hexadecimal digit (or learning to read hexadecimal as
> though it were binary).
If it's educational it can be left as an exercise for the reader. :-)
> In fromhex, what would be done with a string that gives more
> hex digits than the machine precision can support? An obvious
> answer is just to round to the nearest float, but since part of the
> point of hex floats is having a way to specify a given value
> *exactly*, it might make more sense to raise an exception
> rather than changing the value by rounding it.
Whatever Java and C99 do.
--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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