Just sharing a case of floating-point numbers. Nothing needed to be solved or to be figured out. Just bringing up conversation.
(*) An introduction to me I don't understand floating-point numbers from the inside out, but I do know how to work with base 2 and scientific notation. So the idea of expressing a number as mantissa * base^{power} is not foreign to me. (If that helps you to perhaps instruct me on what's going on here.) (*) A presentation of the behavior >>> import sys >>> sys.version '3.8.10 (tags/v3.8.10:3d8993a, May 3 2021, 11:48:03) [MSC v.1928 64 bit (AMD64)]' >>> ls = [7.23, 8.41, 6.15, 2.31, 7.73, 7.77] >>> sum(ls) 39.599999999999994 >>> ls = [8.41, 6.15, 2.31, 7.73, 7.77, 7.23] >>> sum(ls) 39.60000000000001 All I did was to take the first number, 7.23, and move it to the last position in the list. (So we have a violation of the commutativity of addition.) Let me try to reduce the example. It's not so easy. Although I could display the violation of commutativity by moving just a single number in the list, I also see that 7.23 commutes with every other number in the list. (*) My request I would like to just get some clarity. I guess I need to translate all these numbers into base 2 and perform the addition myself to see the situation coming up? -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list