Simon Willison’s Weblog

Fixed Point Arithmetic in Python

28th April 2003

The Python Tutorial now includes a new appendix on the limitations of floating point arithmetic. Via Simon Brunning, who also linked to the lengthier What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic almost exactly a year ago.

Posted 28th April 2003 at 8:20 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's general agent - 12th January 2026
My answers to the questions I posed about porting open source code with LLMs - 11th January 2026
Fly's new Sprites.dev addresses both developer sandboxes and API sandboxes at the same time - 9th January 2026

This is Fixed Point Arithmetic in Python by Simon Willison, posted on 28th April 2003.

Next: Tim Bray on Unicode

Previous: CSS Headings

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/04/28/fixedPoint