Language change and code breaks
pfenn at mmm.com
pfenn at mmm.com
Thu Jul 12 13:17:01 EDT 2001
Tom> I *always* forget the 1/3 == 0 thing between programming
bursts.
Tom> OTOH, I also quickly remember after making the mistake the
first
Tom> time.
What is it that reminds you of the mistake? Is it something glaring
like
using the result of 1/3 as a divisor and getting a divide-by-zero
error, or
is it something more subtle like getting slightly incorrect results
and
having to dig through your code to find the problem?
--
Skip Montanaro (skip at pobox.com)
It's usually easy to find using the primitive tests I set up. Typically,
data starts out as floating point, so this behavior won't cause incorrect
results. Instead, I get incorrect graph labeling, etc. However, this
issue is going to keep coming up as a problem because it's not what an
occasional user, even an experienced occasional user expects to happen,
particularly with a dynamically typed language like Python. This is the
only point on which I consider Visual Basics behavior to be "better" than
Python's.
Is there really much code that depends on 1/3 == 0 being true?
Tom Fenn
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