Epic Number Battles of History: Swift 3 vs Python
Swift 3 has a “decimal” number type that can represent values such as 0.3 that are inexactly represented in Double or Float types. According to this article:
An instance can represent any number that can be expressed as
mantissa x 10^exponentwhere mantissa is a decimal integer up to 38 digits long, and exponent is an integer from –128 through 127.
Note this is not the same as Python’s arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic. This shows up clearly when using Python (on the left) and Swift (on the right) to generate factorial numbers. Differences start to show up at 40! and continue from there.
Not too surprising perhaps, given that Swift has a mantissa + exponent structure underlying its data type, albeit in decimal rather than binary. I just thought it was pretty to look at.