Talk:Approximate equality

Can of worms

uh-oh, you've opened a can of words here. I can remember in the far distant past, being lectured to about floating point/equality/closeness and I resolved to run and hide if I could in the future :-)
Firstly, you can't leave people to find out how Python does it, if you want them to use a specific method then you need to add the description to the task.
Second. Approximation depends on circumstances. If the compared vary exponentially ar non-linearly, or ... then one may end up with different, but more usable definitions of approximately equal.
--Paddy3118 (talk) 12:08, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

Agreed. You need to be very precise about your imprecision. Admittedly my gut instinct was that 100.01 and 100.011 are not approximately equal, like you said, but in fact they are better than 99.999% approximately equal and less than 0.001% different! I just wrote down "what I usually do" and on reflection that is not really likely to meet any task requirements very well. Perhaps explicitly specifying the accuracy (as a fraction, percentage, number of significant digits, decimal places, or whatever) with all the explicitly required answers for each of the various precision settings might help. Also, the test cases should probably be numbered rather than bullet pointed, if you're going to refer to them by number. --Pete Lomax (talk) 01:25, 3 September 2019 (UTC)