On Dec 15, 6:52 pm, greg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So while rationals might be useful to have available for > some things, you should have to explicitly ask for them. > Returning rationals from '/' applied to integers would > be a bad idea, for example.
>From my reading of the PEP, it doesn't suggest such automatic coercions (neither rejects them explicitly though). Given the huge discussions about integer vs true division, it would be very controversial to suggest implicit rational division. Regardless, a builtin (or at least standard library) rational type would be nice to have. Of course folks that *really need* rationals are already using some 3rd party library, but for the rest of us it would be an improvement in several cases where currently floats are used, just like the motivation for Decimals. Only difference seems to be that there aren't so many or compelling use cases for rationals as for decimals (mainly money counting). George -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list