It looks like you're trying to emulate a pocket calculator here. The question is, why are you accepting floats in the first place if that's your goal?
That's fair... if it were me, or you, I wouldn't. In fact, if it were just me, or just you,
I don't think any of us would be talking about this--- I wouldn't even have brought it up.
I am advocating for people--- I am going to say, " if you want just a tad more than double
just to check things out, please use the decimal module and import pdeclib. These folks
are what Guido called newbies, I'll call them naive users, and these folks are using
a calculator (like the TI89) and they will be prone to keying in sqrt(2.345) /
Its just easier than explaining to them (at this point) all the stuff they need to understand to use
the functions by making sure they feed decimals to the function; either by quoting their
numeric inputs, or even using a decimal literal, &c. They know what the functions do,
and will want to use them to get more digits, but may not remember the rules to get the
"correct" digits. So I'm advocating for them, to make it easier.
If it were just me, I'd just make sure the functions got decimals and be done with it.
If you look at my square root function, its really not right; but its closer. For instance if you give it
1/3 it still is only slightly better than before. I don't have all the junk after the 16 th
digit, but, I only have .33333333 to 15 places. So, believe me, I know there is no
one truly good answer here. Just trying to make it easier for the most people.
marcus