Bizarre arithmetic results

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Fri Feb 12 11:08:34 EST 2010


On 2/12/2010 4:40 AM, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
> Terry Reedy writes:
>> On 2/11/2010 11:23 AM, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
>>> Robert Kern writes:
>>>> On 2010-02-11 06:31 AM, Shashwat Anand wrote:
>>>>> There is a little issue here that '>>>   -.1 ** .1' should give you
>>>>> error message. That is it.
>>>>
>>>> No, fractional powers of negative numbers are perfectly valid
>>>> mathematically. The result is a complex number. In Python 3 (what
>>>> the OP is using), this has been implemented, but not in Python 2.6.
>>>
>>> Perhaps it should raise a MisleadingSpacingError at compile time.
>>
>> You forgot the smiley ;-).
>>
>>   >  The error message could recommend - .1**.1, or better -(.1 ** .1).
>>
>> The compiler would never see the difference between -.1 ** .1 and the
>> first and probably no difference with the second either.
>
> It could be done the same way that the compiler keeps track of the
> source line numbers now: early phases annotate their output with any
> information that later phases may need. This error would be detected
> during syntactic analysis.

There is no error to detect. Sorry, read the manual and either learn or 
lookup precedence rules (there is a table in the end of the Expressions 
chapter) or use parentheses when not sure.





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