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[Slightly OT]: More on ints and floats

Michael Hudson mwh at python.net
Tue Apr 8 13:27:07 EDT 2003 
Tim Daneliuk <tundra at tundraware.com> writes:

> I am unclear, though, on whether a mathematician understands 1.0 to
> mean 1.0000000... (a single number) or the _neighborhood_ around 1
> with one digit precision.

I'm a mathematician, albeit not a numerical analyst, and I don't think
considering a float as the interval of real numbers to which it is the
closest floating point approximation is a particularly helpful point
of view.

Floats are perfectly normal rational numbers; it's the *operations*
which are weird.

Cheers,
M.

-- 
 The rapid establishment of social ties, even of a fleeting nature,
 advance not only that goal but its standing in the uberconscious
 mesh of communal psychic, subjective, and algorithmic interbeing.
 But I fear I'm restating the obvious.  -- Will Ware, comp.lang.python
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