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  • Re: Division-Bug in decimal and mpmath

    From Oscar Benjamin@oscar.j.benjamin@gmail.com to comp.lang.python on Sun Dec 15 21:29:18 2024
    From Newsgroup: comp.lang.python

    On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 at 19:02, Mark Bourne via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:

    Martin Ruppert wrote:
    Hi,

    the division 0.4/7 provides a wrong result. It should give a periodic decimal fraction with at most six digits, but it doesn't.

    Below is the comparison of the result of decimal, mpmath, dc and calc.
    ...

    I looks like you might be running into limitations in floating-point
    numbers. At least with decimal, calculating 4/70 instead of 0.4/7
    appears to give the correct result. As does:
    ```
    from decimal import Decimal as dec
    z2 = dec(4) / dec(10)
    print(z2 / dec(nen))
    ```
    You can also pass a string, and `dec("0.4")/dec(10)` gives the correct
    result as well.

    For completeness this is how to do it with mpmath:

    from mpmath import mp
    mp.dps = 60
    mp.mpf('0.4') / 7
    mpf('0.0571428571428571428571428571428571428571428571428571428571428549')

    You can also use SymPy:

    from sympy import Rational
    a = Rational('0.4') / 7
    a
    2/35
    a.evalf(60)
    0.0571428571428571428571428571428571428571428571428571428571429

    SymPy uses mpmath for evalf but it allows doing exact calculations
    first and then evaluating the final exact expression to however many
    digits are desired at the end which means that you don't need to
    accumulate rounding errors before calling evalf.

    --
    Oscar
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