3.2*2 is 9.6 ... or maybe it isn't?

[Scott David Daniels]

Robert Kern wrote:
> ... I wish people would stop representing decimal floating point arithmetic 
> as "more accurate" than binary floating point arithmetic. It isn't. 
> Decimal floating point arithmetic does have an extremely useful niche: 
> ...
Well, we don't actually have an arbitrary-precision, huge exponent
version of binary floating point.  In that sense the Decimal floating
point beats it.  Not that it would be too hard to have such a floating
point in Python (long for mantissa, int for exponent, ...), but we don't
in fact have such a module in place.

--Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org