[SciPy-User] maping a float to a function value

[Charles R Harris]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 1:24 PM, nicky van foreest <vanforeest at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I assume that the problem below has been resolved in a clever,
> pythonic, way, but I don't know how...
>
> For numerical purposes I want to map floats to other floats, and store
> the results. (In math's language, I want to store the mapping x \right
> f(x), for x  in the reals). One natural way would be to use a dict.
> However, using floats as keys in not particularly smart as the real
> numbers (the things I want to deal with) do not map uniquely to
> floats. One way to resolve this is to overload the dict object to a
> class, like so:
>
> class Function(dict):
>    def __init__(self):
>        dict.__init__(self)
>    def __getitem__(self, x):
>        x = round(100*x)
>        return dict.__getitem__(self,x)
>    def __setitem__(self,x, value):
>        x = round(100*x)
>        dict.__setitem__(self,x,value)
>
> However, using a class like this has obvious drawbacks, for instance,
> now I have to memorize that the internal precision is up to 0.01 (and
> I tend to forget stuff like this within a week or so). Of course, I
> can take 1e-13 or so as the internal precision, but I still don't like
> this approach; I have the feeling that much smarter/more robust ways
> exist to resolve this problem.
>
>
This sounds like a proposed solution to a problem. What is the actual
problem that this is supposed to solve?

Chuck
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