[Python-Dev] Expert floats

[Simon Percivall]

On 2004-04-06, at 14.46, Ka-Ping Yee wrote:
> I think we *have* made progress.  Now we can set aside the red-herring
> issue of platform-independent serialization and focus on the real 
> issue:
> human-readable string representation.
[Snip]
> I am tired of making excuses for Python.  I love to tell people about
> Python and show them what it can do for them.  But this floating-point
> problem is embarrassing.  People are confused because no other system
> they've seen behaves like this.  Other languages don't print their
> numbers like this.  Accounting programs and spreadsheets don't print
> their numbers like this.  Matlab and Maple and Mathematica don't print
> their numbers like this.  Only Python insists on being this ugly.  And
> it screws up the most common way that people first get to know Python
> -- as a handy interactive calculator.

So how should "2.2 - 1.2 - 1" be represented?

Matlab (Solaris 9):          2.22044604925031e-16
Octave (MacOS X 10.3):       2.22044604925031e-16
Python 2.3.3 (MacOS X 10.3): 2.2204460492503131e-16

Is this something you accept since Matlab does it?