On Jul 14, 2016 1:52 AM, "Steven D'Aprano" <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > > On Thursday 14 July 2016 15:18, Ian Kelly wrote: > > > Side note, neither do floating point numbers, really; what is often > > called the mantissa is more properly known as the significand. But > > integers don't have that either. > > > Er, then what's a mantissa if it's not what people call a float's mantissa? > > What makes you say it is "more properly" known as the significand? > > I'm not necessarily disputing what you say, I'm wondering what is your > justification for it.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Significand.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Mantissa.html The significand of -3.14159 is the sequence of digits 314159. The mantissa of -3.14159 is the number 0.85841. I don't have a copy of the IEEE-754 standard, but I believe that it also uses the term "significand" and specifically avoids the term "mantissa". -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
