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Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2015 20:36:14 +1000
Subject: Re: What is considered an "advanced" topic in Python?
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
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On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Laura Creighton <lac@openend.se> wrote:
> You have missed my point.  What I want is for floats never to be
> represented as '.' or ',' notation.  That way, when each naive
> user writes his or her first program that deals with money, when
> they look at their computer manual they will come to the section on
> floating point numbers and they will all look like something they
> have never seen before.  So they will read the section carefully
> to see if this is what they want or need, and the section can nicely
> say NEVER USE THIS FOR MONEY and they will know they are in the wrong
> place.

The problem isn't the decimal separator, though, because floats can
have problems even without it (and can have no problems with a decimal
separator). If you want to distinguish "computer numbers" from "real
numbers", you'd do better to pick a different set of symbols for them
- or at least a different numerical base. If all literals were written
in octal, people would understand that there's something special going
on here. But would that really help?

ChrisA