The biggest difference is that some floating-point calculations that will converge (disappear at 0 or converge on a fixed value) will not terminate in rational computation. Since this sort of thing is not a very good way to use floats either, it should provoke more-appropriate numerical techniques. -- Dennis -----Original Message----- From: edu-sig-admin@python.org [mailto:edu-sig-admin@python.org]On Behalf Of Lloyd Hugh Allen Sent: Friday, October 11, 2002 17:52 To: edu-sig@python.org Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] Re: rationals [ ... ] Here's a question from someone who hasn't used rationals outside of Mathematica, TI-89/92, some sort of weird Casio, and the like, mostly in an interactive basis, on an issue that people had later in the thread: besides the representation given by the "print" command, how would code be affected if the programmer expected a float and the engine had been upgraded to return a rational instead? What would break? _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig