Mark, May you elaborate on your use case? I have not stumbled upon the need for such a high tolerance. I had imagined that the isclose() algorithm's use cases were to compare floating point numbers; which I thought to mean equal up to some number of significant digits (3 or more). Given such small epsilon, logarithmic granularity is good enough. I believe the majority of use cases for isclose() will involve such small tolerances. For larger tolerances, like you suggest, it is probably best be phrased as `0.5 <= x < 1.5`, or `abs(x-1) <=0.5`. Furthermore, the version of `isclose()` I advocate need not have integer parameters `isclose(x, 1, abs_tol = -log10(0.5))` is a legitimate, albeit ugly. Thank you for you time discussing this. On 2015-02-17 8:37 AM, Mark Young wrote:
That's trading a teeny tiny bit of convenience for one particular use case for the flexibility to choose any number as the tolerance. If that change were made, I would have no means of specifying any sort of tolerance other than powers of 10. I can easily see myself saying "This number needs to be 1 +- .5"