I read an interesting comment: """ The coolest thing I've ever discovered about Pythagorean's Theorem is an alternate way to calculate it. If you write a program that uses the distance form c = sqrt(a^2 + b^2) you will suffer from the lose of half of your available precision because the square root operation is last. A more accurate calculation is c = a * sqrt(1 + b^2 / a^2). If a is less than b, you should swap them and of course handle the special case of a = 0. """
Is this valid? Does it apply to python? Any other thoughts? :D My imagining: def distance(A, B): """ A & B are objects with x and y attributes :return: the distance between A and B """ dx = B.x - A.x dy = B.y - A.y a = min(dx, dy) b = max(dx, dy) if a == 0: return b elif b == 0: return a else: return a * sqrt(1 + (b / a)**2) -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list