this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
257 points (98.1% liked)
Programmer Humor
19480 readers
595 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Please don't try to approximate. Use the decimal module to represent numbers and everything will work as expected and it has a ton of other features you didn't know you needed.
https://docs.python.org/3/library/decimal.html#module-decimal
Decimal does come at a cost though, being slower than raw floats. When you don't need precision but do need performance then it is still valid to use floats. And quite often you don't need absolute precision for things.
Decimal is less precise than binary. It's just imprecise in ways that are less surprising to humans.
Be careful however, if you work with really large numbers this will absolutely tank your performance and eat up all your memory.
There's a reason floating point numbers exist. They are very good at what they do, at the cost of lower precision and being a bit more difficult to work with.