float / double support in Python?

[Terry Reedy]

"Brandon Van Every" <vanevery at 3DProgrammer.com> wrote in message
news:4fB0a.2838$tO2.315014 at newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
> float and double support is very critical to ease-of-use for my 3D
graphics
> programming work.  How does Python fare for number crunching?  I'm
not so

If you use Numerical Python, which, among other things, wraps at least
some of the C functions from BLAS, LINPACK, and  FFTPACK, pretty well.
I believe arrays can be either C float or double.

> much concerned with efficiency, I'm not expecting much, but rather
syntax,
> universality of support on different platforms, or other headaches /
> gotchas.  For instance it's not acceptable to represent a float
/double as a
> string, it has to be 4 bytes / 8 bytes.

Python proper only uses 'floats' which (for CPython) are 8 byte C
doubles.

>  I heard at one point that people
> were considering abolishing floating point support from the
language?

Nope.  Some specialized versions for embedded systems leave them out
for compactness.

Terry J. Reedy