Exponential Notation and integers

[Timothy Fitz]

Why are all numberical literals in exponential notation floats? To me
it is counter-intuitive for 1e3 to behave so fundamentally different
from 1000.

Timothy Fitz

[Erik Max Francis]

Timothy Fitz wrote:

Why are all numberical literals in exponential notation floats? To me
it is counter-intuitive for 1e3 to behave so fundamentally different
from 1000.

Probably primarily by convention. Most language use computerized
scientific notation to represent floating point numbers, not integers.
It makes sense, after all: should 1.344e3 be an int, but 1.344e2 be a
float?

--
Erik Max Francis && ma*@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
I'll have to get over this sooner or later. Why not now?
-- Louis Wu

[Peter Hansen]

Erik Max Francis wrote:

Timothy Fitz wrote:

Why are all numberical literals in exponential notation floats? To me
it is counter-intuitive for 1e3 to behave so fundamentally different
from 1000.

Probably primarily by convention. Most language use computerized
scientific notation to represent floating point numbers, not integers.
It makes sense, after all: should 1.344e3 be an int, but 1.344e2 be a
float?

No, naturally 1.344e2 is the integer 134. <wink>
Maybe something like this would help the OP:

def number(x): .... return int(float(x))
.... MYCONSTANT = number('1.344e3')
print MYCONSTANT

1344

-Peter

[Timothy Fitz]

My comment is more of a linguistic complaint. The differences between
an integer (type int or long) and a float in practice are large,
shouldn't 1e100 be of an integer type, since it -is- an integer? The
default practice here of making it a float just seems wrong.

[Peter Hansen]

Maybe something like this would help the OP:

def number(x): ... return int(float(x))
... MYCONSTANT = number('1.344e3')
print MYCONSTANT 1344

Yes, this would work in some cases, but not where it matters. Floats
have a significant amount of error when you are talking about very
large numbers, which is the only time you would want integer
exponential literals anyway, examples of errors:

long(1e100) 10000000000000000159028911097599180468360808563945 28138978132755774783877217038106081346998585681510 4L 1e20 == 10 ** 20 + 8192 True long(1e23) == 10 ** 23

False

The worst part is that because python will implicitly convert between
floats and integers, this can all happen silently and come back and
bite you where you least expect it.

[Fábio Mendes]

Em Qui, 2004-11-18 às 15:49 -0800, Erik Max Francis escreveu:

Timothy Fitz wrote:

Why are all numberical literals in exponential notation floats? To me
it is counter-intuitive for 1e3 to behave so fundamentally different
from 1000.
Probably primarily by convention. Most language use computerized
scientific notation to represent floating point numbers, not integers.
It makes sense, after all: should 1.344e3 be an int, but 1.344e2 be a
float?

As far as readbility is concerned, some languages provide the 1_000_000
syntax (1000000 is just too hard to read). Is there any plans to add
this to python?

Thanks,
Fabio
--
Erik Max Francis && ma*@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
I'll have to get over this sooner or later. Why not now?
-- Louis Wu