On Mon, May 23, 2005, Greg Ewing wrote:
>
> But I also found it interesting that, while the spec requires the
> existence of a context for each operation, it apparently *doesn't*
> mandate that it must be kept in a global variable, which is the part
> that makes me uncomfortable.
>
> Was there any debate about this choice when the Decimal module was
> being designed?
Absolutely. First of all, as Michael Chermside pointed out, it's
actually thread-local. But even without that, we were still prepared to
release Decimal with global context. Look at Java: you have to specify
the context manually with every operation. It was a critical design
criterion for Python that this be legal::
>>> x = Decimal('1.2')
>>> y = Decimal('1.4')
>>> x*y
Decimal("1.68")
IOW, constructing Decimal instances might be a bit painful, but *using*
them would be utterly simple.
--
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste." --Steve Jobs
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