Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> writes: > On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 2:09 AM, Steven D'Aprano > <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >> Are you saying that the Egyptians, Babylonians and Greeks didn't know how to >> work with fractions? >> >> http://mathworld.wolfram.com/EgyptianFraction.html >> >> http://nrich.maths.org/2515 >> >> Okay, it's not quite 4000 years ago. Sometimes my historical sense of the >> distant past is a tad inaccurate. Shall we say 2000 years instead? > > Those links give dates of 1650 BC and 1800 BC respectively, so I'd say > your initial guess was closer.
Right, but this is to miss the point. Let's say that 4000 years have defined 1/3 to be one third, but Python 3 (as do many programming languages) defines 1/3 to be something very very very very close to one third, and *that* idea is very very very very new! It's unfortunate that the example in this thread does not illustrate the main problem of shifting to binary floating point, because 1/2 happens to be exactly representable. -- Ben. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
