[Mark Favas]

Just a little unreality check - the whole world is not (yet) Linux - or even MS. The behaviour of math.exp(-746) on my flavours of 1.5.2 on Solaris boxes and DEC Alphas (Tru64 Unix) is the same as the behaviour of 2.0 - OverflowError: math range error.

This is unfortunate. Guido never intended for Python to raise exceptions on underflow (and especially not *Over*flowError(!)), but he apparently didn't run on any platforms where this happened (I never have!), and AFAIK nobody ever mentioned this before.

Thus, on these platform, the proposed fixes _will_ change behaviour.

See "unfortunate" above <0.5 wink>.

But that's cool - I like Tim's proposed, um, steps to "rationalizing" fp behaviour, and will do what I can to help in the future.

Want to fund a crack group of 754 experts for a year? Didn't think so. Constructive complaints will help a lot. So will beta testing. For example, I'm very keen to know whether the current CVS version of Python (2.0c1) still raises OverflowError for math.exp(-746) on your Solaris and/or Tru64 Unix boxes. Running the (current CVS) std test suite will tell you: test_libm will pass or fail accordingly. If it's still busted on one of your systems, we've only got about a day to fix it (2.0 final is shipping early next week, and we have to let the codebase settle down for a couple days before building the final release). but-since-it's-been-a-random-mess-for-a-decade-already-i'm-not- losing-much-sleep-over-it-ly y'rs - tim