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There is one example program for chapter 5: download chapter5.zip.
To determine your floating-point hardware’s performance on Windows machines, download machar.zip. (The archive contains the source file in C.)
Download a program to print out pi (courtesy of Jaap Spies, j.spies@hccnet.nl), pipoem.zip. There are lots of others floating around, but this one is particularly nice.
Find out how to measure the speed of light yourself using chocolate and a microwave oven http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~mbailes/P140/lecture22/index.htm.
Read what Duncan Steel has to say about the use of Julian Calendar years in astronomical measurement at steel.html. Buy his book:
Visit Simon Cassidy’s Web site at http://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/cassidy/.
For some introductory material on imaginary, complex, rational and irrational numbers, see http://www.math.toronto.edu/mathnet/answers/imaginary.html, and related topics on the same site.
For more advanced material on complex numbers, read Paul J. Nahin’s delightful book, An Imaginary Tale.
For a discussion of Mayan calendrical math, see http://www.foretec.com/python/workshops/1998-11/proceedings.html, which, among other things, discusses negative numbers and the Mayans’ view of them.
For a discussion of positional number systems, such as the base 32768 system used to implement Python’s long integers, take a look at Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, Seminumerical Algorithms.
In an earlier chapter, I described a number of floating-point “gotchas,” things you need to watch out for, especially when dividing floating-point numbers. It would probably be useful to review the gotchas; see Hour 3, “Basic Arithmetic with Python.”
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