Raymond Hettinger wrote: > The question of > where to stack decimals in the hierarchy was erroneously > being steered by the concept that both decimal and binary floats > are intrinsically inexact. But that would be incorrect, inexactness > is a taint, the numbers themselves are always exact. I don't think that's correct. "Numbers are always exact" is a simplification due to choosing not to attach an inexactness flag to every value. Without such a flag, we don't really know whether any given value is exact or not, we can only guess. The reason for regarding certain types as "implicitly inexact" is something like this: If you start with exact ints, and do only int operations with them, you must end up with exact ints. But the same is not true of float or Decimal: even if you start with exact values, you can end up with inexact ones. > I really like Guido's idea of a context flag to control whether > mixing of decimal and binary floats will issue a warning. Personally I feel that far too much stuff concerning decimals is controlled by implicit context parameters. It gives me the uneasy feeling that I don't know what the heck any given decimal operation is going to do. It's probably justified in this case, though. -- Greg
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