How does Micropython avoid double precision issues?

[alidayvn]

After implementing doubles, I wanted to test double equality. But to my surprise, 0.1+0.2==0.3 returns True instead of False, although on my PC, Python3 does return False.

I also tried 0.1+0.2-0.3, which returns 5.551115123125783e-17 on my PC, but 0.0 on Micropython.

I thought avoiding double precision issues was only possible with BCD, but from what I've seen, Micropython floats are plain old IEEE754 floats.

- How does Micropython avoid these kinds of double precision issues?
- Is there an operation where a BCD system (used by TI/casio calculators) would return a different answer from Micropython?

[stijn]

There is no way to avoid those issues, it's inherent to using floating point numbers. And yes it's possible different implementations will return different answers. As such you should probably never compare floating point numbers using ==, if you need to compare them you should use math.isclose or similar.

[jimmo]

In the specific example of 0.1+0.2==0.3, this is True on single-precision STM32, and False on double-precision STM32 and the (also double-precision) Unix port.