Float
Steven D'Aprano
steve at pearwood.info
Fri Jul 29 10:26:55 EDT 2016
On Fri, 29 Jul 2016 07:44 pm, Cai Gengyang wrote:
> Can someone explain in layman's terms what "float" means ?
Floating point number:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point
As opposed to fixed point numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_arithmetic
Python floats use 64 bits (approximately 18 decimal digits). Because the
decimal point can "float" from place to place, they can represent very
small numbers:
1.2345678901234567e-100
and very big numbers:
1.2345678901234567e100
using just 64 bits. If it were *fixed* decimal place, the range would be a
lot smaller: for example, suppose the decimal place was fixed after three
digits. The largest number would be 999.999999999999999 and the smallest
would be 0.000000000000001.
--
Steven
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.
More information about the Python-list
mailing list