Exponential Notation and integers

T

Timothy Fitz

Why are all numberical literals in exponential notation floats? To me
it is counter-intuitive for 1e3 to behave so fundamentally different
from 1000.

Timothy Fitz
 
E

Erik Max Francis

Timothy said:
Why are all numberical literals in exponential notation floats? To me
it is counter-intuitive for 1e3 to behave so fundamentally different
from 1000.

Probably primarily by convention. Most language use computerized
scientific notation to represent floating point numbers, not integers.
It makes sense, after all: should 1.344e3 be an int, but 1.344e2 be a
float?
 
P

Peter Hansen

Erik said:
Probably primarily by convention. Most language use computerized
scientific notation to represent floating point numbers, not integers.
It makes sense, after all: should 1.344e3 be an int, but 1.344e2 be a
float?

No, naturally 1.344e2 is the integer 134. <wink>


Maybe something like this would help the OP:
.... return int(float(x))
....1344

-Peter
 
T

Timothy Fitz

My comment is more of a linguistic complaint. The differences between
an integer (type int or long) and a float in practice are large,
shouldn't 1e100 be of an integer type, since it -is- an integer? The
default practice here of making it a float just seems wrong.

[Peter Hansen]
Maybe something like this would help the OP:

... return int(float(x))
...
1344

Yes, this would work in some cases, but not where it matters. Floats
have a significant amount of error when you are talking about very
large numbers, which is the only time you would want integer
exponential literals anyway, examples of errors:
False

The worst part is that because python will implicitly convert between
floats and integers, this can all happen silently and come back and
bite you where you least expect it.
 
?

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?F=E1bio?= Mendes

Em Qui, 2004-11-18 às 15:49 -0800, Erik Max Francis escreveu:
Probably primarily by convention. Most language use computerized
scientific notation to represent floating point numbers, not integers.
It makes sense, after all: should 1.344e3 be an int, but 1.344e2 be a
float?
As far as readbility is concerned, some languages provide the 1_000_000
syntax (1000000 is just too hard to read). Is there any plans to add
this to python?

Thanks,
Fabio
 

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