Cai Gengyang <gengyang...@gmail.com> writes: > Can someone explain in layman's terms what "float" means ?
They are a compromise: in a known number of bits and with explict very-fast hardware support, represent numbers at a large range of scales. The compromise is that the values have limited precision for representing those numbers. <URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point> If you want exact representations of numbers, you don't want floating-point numbers; you want Fraction or Decimal or integer etc. If you just want to have fairly-good precision of fractional numbers, as fast as your computer can compute them, then maybe the built-in floating-point numbers are what you want. There is no substitute for knowing the characteristics of floating-point numbers, and using that information to decide when they are appropriate and when they are not. -- \ “Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are | `\ in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters.” | _o__) —Ernestine Rose | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
