Tim Rowe wrote:
I'm reading Mark Summerfield's "Programming Python 3.0" at the moment,
and I'm puzzled by some of his uses of sys.float_info.epsilon. I
appreciate the issues of comparing floating point numbers, but I'm
puzzled by code like:
...
x = float(input(msg))
if abs(x) < sys.float_info.epsilon:
...
What could the float() conversion return that would give different results for:
if abs(x) < sys.float_info.epsilon
and (to my mind, more obvious):
if abs(x) == 0.0
I didn't realise that float() could return anything with an absolute
value less than sys.float_value.epsilon other than 0.0 (which I think
all representations can represent exactly). What am I missing here?
You are missing the whole thing that mes floating point tricky.
I _believe_ that the epsilon is the smallest positive x such that
1.0 != 1.0 + x
That doesn't mean that x is the smallest representable. for example,
.0125 + epsilon / 4 != .0125
To avoid using epsilon, do something like:
if 1 + abs(x) != 1:
To learn a bit more, look into numerical analysis -- there is a whole
field dedicated to figuring out how to make floating point behave a
little bit like real numbers. The reason it is tough is that addition
is not associative in real numbers, and associativity is at the core
of a lot of proofs in arithmetic (and group theory).
--Scott David Daniels
scott.dani...@acm.org
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