<cont.> The easiest implementation of using fractional datatype is probably to add a new operator. Some scientific calculators provide a special operator to signify a fraction (somewhat on the shape of a small L in mine) and I strongly believe that their internal calculation probably used fractions even when regular division is used, only when the calculator have difficulties using fraction (like calculating sin/cos/ tan function) or the screen is not wide enough to represent the fraction would it use regular division.
Python implemented complex numbers, why not fractions? Random ramble past here: Actually, my vision would be not only fractions, but also rooted number (square root, cube root, etc), it could be possible to implement a type where a number consist of a rooted number times a multiplier plus a variable [a + b * root(c, d)]. But I guess this would be extremely complex and it requires nesting, probably very slow if implementation isn't good. The advantage of using such is much faster operations, as long as str() is not called. This actually reflects my way of doing paper math, I save the lossy operations (float division, root, trigonometric function) until the very end of calculation (I'm not fundamentalist though, so compromise sometimes is done here and there). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
