On Oct 26, 1:54 am, Lennart Benschop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> My proposal:
> - Any decimal constant suffixed with the letter "D" or "d" will be
> interpreted as a literal of the Decimal type. This also goes for
> decimal constants with exponential notation.
There's nothing new here that hasn't already been proposed and
discussed on python-dev. There were no major objections to the idea;
however, it will need to wait until there is a good C implementation
of the decimal module (which is in the works but coming along very,
very slowly). Also, once we have a C coded decimal object, further
work would be needed to make it integrate well with the rest of the
language (i.e. making sure that everything allows numeric inputs can
handle a decimal object as a possible input).
FWIW, using the decimal module is not at all as onerous as the OP
makes it sound. I write:
from decimal import Decimal as D
print D(1) / D(7) + D('0.123456')
That isn't much of a burden compared with:
print 1d / 7d + 0.123456d
You would still need to import decimal so you can set the context
parameters (like precision and rounding).
Also, most non-toy scripts have *very* few literals in them; instead,
the decimal values arise from calculations, user inputs, and file of
data. Casting those to the correct type is really no more difficult
that it is with other types:
s = raw_input('Input temperature')
print int(s), Decimal(s), float(s)
Raymond
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