Binary Decimals in Python

Grant Edwards invalid at invalid.invalid
Tue Mar 30 14:08:14 EDT 2010


On 2010-03-30, John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> wrote:

> Hex floats are useful because you can get a string representation of
> the exact value of a binary floating point number.  It should always
> be the case that
>
> 	 float.fromhex(float.hex(x)) == x

Until you try running your program on a machine that represents floats
using a radix other than 2,4, or 16.

;)

And it works for NaN and Inf too!

It would have been nice to have had that 5-6 years ago when I had to
write my own pickle/unpickle methods for floating point values so that
inf and nan were portable between Windows and Linux.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! But they went to MARS
                                  at               around 1953!!
                              gmail.com            



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