Steve Holden wrote: >> It /would/ be nice to see Decimal() become the default. I cannot >> imagine why in an otherwise "human enough" language, math wouldn't be >> included in that without going out of one's way to do it. :-) >> > Speed has a lot to do with it. Have you timed some decimal operations > against their floating-point counterparts? It might be possible to build > a version of Python that used decimal instead of floating-point but it > certainly wouldn't be trivial: consider the use of C language libraries > that know nothing of Python's decimal representation.
judging from the various decimal FAQ:s, I think it's a bit naive to think that using Decimal instead of float would somehow make everything "just work": http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/decifaq.html http://effbot.org/pylib/decimal.htm#decimal-faq (btw, the OP mentioned in private mail that he wanted to store geographical coordinates in decimal because floats kept messing things up, but given that a 64-bit float can hold enough decimal digits to represent a geographical coordinate with sub-millimeter precision on a global scale, I'm not sure I buy that argument. I suspect he was just tricked by the usual repr(1.15) != "1.15" issue. and seriously, under- standing the various aspects of floats and decimals is utterly trivial compared to all the nearly-magical things you need to understand to be able to do geographical calculations at a sub-millimeter scale. heck, even sub-kilometer stuff is pretty hard to get right ;-) </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
