On Tue, Mar 30, 2004, Andrew P. Lentvorski, Jr. wrote: > > My question is: Is it possible that a C implementation of Decimal > would be almost as fast as native floating point in Python for > reasonable digit lengths and settings? (ie. use native FP as an > approximation and then do some tests to get the last digit right). Basic answer: yes, for people not doing serious number crunching > This is similar to the long int/int unification. Long ints are slow, > but things are okay as long as the numbers are within the native > range. The hope would be that Decimal configurations which fit within > the machine format are reasonably fast, but things outside it slow > down. Well, that won't happen. The long/int issue at least has compatibility at the binary level; binary/decimal conversions lead us right back to the problems that Decimal is trying to fix. > Please note that nowhere did I comment that creating such a C > implementation of Decimal would be easy or even possible. ;) Actually, the whole point of the Decimal class is that it's easy to implement. Once we agree on the API and semantics, converting to C should be not much harder than trivial. Although I ended up dropping the ball, that's the whole reason I got involved with Decimal in the first place: the intention is that Decimal written in C will release the GIL. It will be an experiment in computational threading. -- Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ "usenet imitates usenet" --Darkhawk
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