The point is that this function is already in Python and if you want to do something different, you should have a really good reason to do it differently.  If you were to add a function to math, say math.close, it should work like numpy.allclose in my opinion.

For reference, numpy does this:

absolute(a - b) <= (atol + rtol * absolute(b))

where atol is an absolute tolerance and rtol is a relative tolerance (relative to the actual value b).  This subsumes most of the proposals here.

Best,

Neil

On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 7:48 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 4:23 PM, Neil Girdhar <mistersheik@gmail.com> wrote:

nothing new there, I'm afaid -- and no one seemed to have brought up the issue with zero. 

-Chris

 
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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

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