On Sun, 11 Mar 2001, Guido van Rossum <guido@digicool.com> wrote:
> I believe that a fourth PEP should be written as well: decimal
> floating point. Maybe Tim can draft this?
Better. I have very little decimal point experience, and in any way
I'd find it hard to write a PEP I don't believe it. However, I would
rather that it be written if only to be officially rejected, so if
no one volunteers to write it, I'm willing to do it anyway.
(Besides, I might manage to actually overtake Jeremy in number of PEPs
if I do this)
> It's kind of sneaky not to mention in the abstract that this should be
> the default representation for numbers containing a decimal point,
> replacing most use of floats!
I beg the mercy of the court. This was here, but got lost in the editing.
I've put it back.
> This PEP definitely needs a section of arguments Pro and Con. For
> Con, mention at least that rational arithmetic is much slower than
> floating point, and can become *very* much slower when algorithms
> aren't coded carefully.
Note that I did try to help with coding carefully by adding the ".trim"
method.
> There are also backwards compatibility issues at the C level.
Hmmmmm....what are those? Very few c functions explicitly expect a
float, and the responsibility here can be pushed off to the Python
programmer by having to use explicit floats. For the others, PyArg_ParseTuple
can just coerce to float with the "d" type.
> Question: the time module's time() function currently returns a
> float. Should it return a rational instead? This is a trick question.
It should return the most exact number the underlying operating system
supports. For example, in OSes supporting gettimeofday, return a rational
built from tv_sec and tv_usec.
--
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