Floating Point Numbers and Strings (Vocabulary)

Vocabulary flashcards covering floating point numbers and strings, including notation, limits, and string handling in Python.

Floating point number

A real number with a decimal point, stored in binary with limited precision (mantissa and exponent), which can lead to rounding errors.

Scientific notation

A way to write numbers as mantissa × 10^exponent; in Python, written as mantissa e exponent with no spaces.

Mantissa

The significant digits part of a floating point number in scientific notation.

Exponent

The power of 10 in scientific notation; determines the magnitude of the number.

Python scientific notation syntax

Use the letter e to denote the exponent (e.g., 1.234567e3); no spaces around the e.

Round-off error

The small discrepancy that arises because floating point values are represented with finite precision.

Infinity (floating point)

A value indicating overflow; represents numbers too large to represent, often shown as inf.

Overflow

Condition where a number exceeds the largest representable magnitude, causing overflow to Infinity.

Underflow

Condition where a number is too small to be represented (near zero) and may be rounded to zero.

Binary representation

Numbers are stored in binary form in the computer; floating point numbers use binary encoding.

String

Text data; a sequence of characters.

String delimiter (single vs double quotes)

Strings can be delimited by either single quotes or double quotes; choosing the delimiter avoids conflicts when the text contains the other quote.

Escape character

Backslash used to escape quotes and to introduce special characters like \n (newline), \t (tab), and \ (backslash).

Triple-quoted strings

Strings delimited by three consecutive quotes (three singles or three doubles); they can span multiple lines and include quotes without escaping.

Newline escape sequence

Escape sequence \n inserts a line break within a string.