[Edu-sig] Re: rationals

[Dennis E. Hamilton]

The biggest difference is that some floating-point calculations that will
converge (disappear at 0 or converge on a fixed value) will not terminate in
rational computation.

Since this sort of thing is not a very good way to use floats either, it
should provoke more-appropriate numerical techniques.

-- Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: edu-sig-admin@python.org [mailto:edu-sig-admin@python.org]On
Behalf Of Lloyd Hugh Allen
Sent: Friday, October 11, 2002 17:52
To: edu-sig@python.org
Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] Re: rationals

[ ... ]

Here's a question from someone who hasn't used rationals outside of
Mathematica, TI-89/92, some sort of weird Casio, and the like, mostly in
an interactive basis, on an issue that people had later in the thread:
besides the representation given by the "print" command, how would code
be affected if the programmer expected a float and the engine had been
upgraded to return a rational instead? What would break?

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