Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info>: > I think one could better think of Scheme's semantics as a > poorly-thought out hybrid between traditional numerics and a vague > approximation to interval arithmetic.
Python programmers (among others) frequently run into issues with surprising results in floating-point arithmetics. For better or worse, Scheme has tried to abstract the concept. You don't need to explain the ideas of IEEE 64-bit floating-point numbers or tie the hands of the implementation. Instead, what you have is "reliable" arithmetics and "best-effort" arithmetics, a bit like TCP is "reliable" and UDP is "best-effort". "Inexact" means there's a possibility of rounding errors. "Exact" means no rounding errors were introduced by the limitations of the hardware or the algorithms. How inexact the inexact results is a complicated topic for numeric programming. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
