[Numpy-discussion] arange and floating point arguments

[Charles R Harris]

On 9/14/07, Ed Schofield <edschofield@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> This was reported yesterday as a bug in Debian's numpy package:
>
> >>> len(numpy.arange(0, 0.6, 0.1)) == len(numpy.arange(0, 0.4+0.2, 0.1))
> False
>
> The cause is this:
>
> >>> ceil((0.4+0.2)/0.1)
> 7.0
>
> >>> ceil(0.6/0.1)
> 6.0
>
> which holds for both numpy's and the standard library's ceil().


Since none of the numbers are  exactly represented in IEEE floating point,
this sort of oddity is expected.  If you look at the exact values, (.4 +
.2)/.1 > 6 and .6/.1 < 6 . That said, I would expect something like
ceil(interval/delta - relatively_really_small_number) would generally return
the expected result. Matlab probably plays these sort of games. The downside
is encouraging bad programming habits. In this case, the programmer should
be using linspace..

Chuck.
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