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Diffstat (limited to 'numpy/doc/basics.py')
| -rw-r--r-- | numpy/doc/basics.py | 39 |
1 files changed, 39 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/numpy/doc/basics.py b/numpy/doc/basics.py index c87a40ccd..002682487 100644 --- a/numpy/doc/basics.py +++ b/numpy/doc/basics.py @@ -260,6 +260,45 @@ identical behaviour between arrays and scalars, irrespective of whether the value is inside an array or not. NumPy scalars also have many of the same methods arrays do. +Overflow Errors +=============== + +The fixed size of NumPy numeric types may cause overflow errors when a value +requires more memory than available in the data type. For example, `np.power` +evaluates ``100 * 10 ** 8`` correctly for 64-bit integers, but gives +1874919424 (incorrect) for a 32-bit integer. + + >>> np.power(100, 8, dtype=np.int64) + 10000000000000000 + >>> np.power(100, 8, dtype=np.int32) + 1874919424 + +The behaviour of NumPy and Python integer types differs significantly for +integer overflows and may confuse users expecting NumPy integers to behave +similar to Python's ``int``. Unlike NumPy, the size of Python's ``int`` is +flexible. This means Python integers may expand to accomodate any integer and +will not overflow. + +NumPy provides `numpy.iinfo` and `numpy.finfo` to verify the +minimum or maximum values of NumPy integer and floating point values +respectively :: + + >>> np.iinfo(np.int) # Bounds of the default integer on this system. + iinfo(min=-9223372036854775808, max=9223372036854775807, dtype=int64) + >>> np.iinfo(np.int32) # Bounds of a 32-bit integer + iinfo(min=-2147483648, max=2147483647, dtype=int32) + >>> np.iinfo(np.int64) # Bounds of a 64-bit integer + iinfo(min=-9223372036854775808, max=9223372036854775807, dtype=int64)s + +If 64-bit integers are still too small the result may be cast to a +floating point number. Floating point numbers offer a larger, but inexact, +range of possible values. + + >>> np.power(100, 100, dtype=np.int64) # Incorrect even with 64-bit int + 0 + >>> np.power(100, 100, dtype=np.float64) + 1e+200 + Extended Precision ================== |