On Jun 9, 3:07 pm, Mel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Frank Millman wrote:
>
> > class Number(object):
> > def __init__(self,value,scale):
> > self.factor = 10.0**scale
> > if isinstance(value,Number):
> > value = value.value / value.factor
>
> I think this could lead to trouble. One complaint against binary floating
> point is that it messes up low-order decimal digits, and this ensures that
> all calculations are effectively done in binary floating point. Better, I
> think would be
>
> if isinstance (value, Number):
> self.value = value.value
> self.scale = scale + value.scale
>
> and be done with it.
>
Thanks for the reply, Mel. I don't quite understand what you mean.
Bear in mind my next line, which you did not quote -
if isinstance(value,Number):
value = value.value / value.factor
--> self.value = long(round(value * self.factor))
I do understand that binary floating point does not always give the
expected results when trying to do decimal arithmetic.
However, given a float f1 and a scaling factor s, I thought that if I
did the following -
i1 = long(round(f1 * s)) # scale up to integer
f2 = i1 / s # reduce back to float
i2 = long(round(f2 * s)) # scale up again
then i2 would always be equal to i1.
If you are saying that there could be situations where this is not
guaranteed, then I agree with you that what I have written is
dangerous.
I will do some more testing to see if this could happen. I suppose
that if the scaling factor is very high it could cause a problem, but
I cannot envisage it exceeding 6 in my application.
Thanks
Frank
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