On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 12:54 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.br...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 11:24 AM, Charles R Harris
> <charlesr.har...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 12:17 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.br...@gmail.com
> >
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> While struggling with floating point precision, I ran into this:
> >>
> >> In [52]: a = 2**54+3
> >>
> >> In [53]: a
> >> Out[53]: 18014398509481987L
> >>
> >> In [54]: np.float128(a)
> >> Out[54]: 18014398509481988.0
> >>
> >> In [55]: np.float128(a)-1
> >> Out[55]: 18014398509481987.0
> >>
> >> The line above tells us that float128 can exactly represent 2**54+3,
> >> but the line above that says that np.float128(2**54+3) rounds upwards
> >> as if it were a float64:
> >>
> >> In [59]: np.float64(a)
> >> Out[59]: 18014398509481988.0
> >>
> >> In [60]: np.float64(a)-1
> >> Out[60]: 18014398509481988.0
> >>
> >> Similarly:
> >>
> >> In [66]: np.float128('1e308')
> >> Out[66]: 1.000000000000000011e+308
> >>
> >> In [67]: np.float128('1e309')
> >> Out[67]: inf
> >>
> >> Is it possible that float64 is being used somewhere in float128 casting?
> >>
> >
> > The problem is probably in specifying the values. Python doesn't support
> > long double and I expect python integers to be converted to doubles, then
> > cast to long double.
>
> Presumably our (numpy) casting function receives the python integer,
> and therefore its
> us who are doing the conversion? If so, surely that is a bug?
>
>
I believe the numpy casting function is supplied by Python. Python integers
aren't C types.
> > The only way to get around this is probably using
> > string representations of the numbers, and I don't know how
> > well/consistently numpy does that at the moment. If it calls python to do
> > the job, then double is probably what is returned. It doesn't help on my
> > system:
> >
> > In [1]: float128("18014398509481987.0")
> > Out[1]: 18014398509481988.0
>
> Note though that:
>
> >> In [66]: np.float128('1e308')
> >> Out[66]: 1.000000000000000011e+308
> >>
> >> In [67]: np.float128('1e309')
> >> Out[67]: inf
>
> and I infer that we (numpy) are using float64 for converting the
> strings; that seems to me to be the likely explanation of both
> phenomena - do you agree?
>
>
I expect we are using Python to convert the strings, unicode and all that.
However, I would need to check.
Chuck
_______________________________________________
NumPy-Discussion mailing list
NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org
http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
