On Fri, 29 Jul 2016 07:44 pm, Cai Gengyang wrote: > Can someone explain in layman's terms what "float" means ?
Floating point number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point As opposed to fixed point numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_arithmetic Python floats use 64 bits (approximately 18 decimal digits). Because the decimal point can "float" from place to place, they can represent very small numbers: 1.2345678901234567e-100 and very big numbers: 1.2345678901234567e100 using just 64 bits. If it were *fixed* decimal place, the range would be a lot smaller: for example, suppose the decimal place was fixed after three digits. The largest number would be 999.999999999999999 and the smallest would be 0.000000000000001. -- Steven “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list