I ran across what seems to be a change in how numerics are handled in Python 2.6 or Numpy 1.3.0 or both, I'm not sure. I've recently switched from using Python 2.4 and Numpy 1.0.3 to using the Python 2.6 and Numpy 1.3.0 that comes with SAGE which is a large mathematical package. But the issue seems to be a Python one, not a SAGE one. Here is a short example of code that gives the new behavior: # ---- Return the angle between two vectors ------------ def get_angle(v1,v2): '''v1 and v2 are 1 dimensional numpy arrays''' # Make unit vectors out of v1 and v2 v1norm=sqrt(dot(v1,v1)) v2norm=sqrt(dot(v2,v2)) v1unit=v1/v1norm v2unit=v2/v2norm ang=acos(dot(v1unit,v2unit)) return ang When using Python 2.6 with Numpy 1.3.0 and v1 and v2 are parallel the dot product of v1unit and v2unit sometimes gives 1.0+epsilon where epsilon is the smallest step in the floating point numbers around 1.0 as given in the sys module. This causes acos to throw a Domain Exception. This does not happen when I use Python 2.4 with Numpy 1.0.3. I have put in a check for the exception situation and the code works fine again. I am wondering if there are other changes that I should be aware of. Does anyone know the origin of the change above or other differences in the handling of numerics between the two versions? Thanks for any insight. -- Lou Pecora, my views are my own.