In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, George Sakkis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >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).
You've precisely hit on the problem: previous discussion about rationals has bogged down because proponents insisted on making it a built-in type rather than a library. If a PEP were submitted with code for a library, there would be little trouble getting it accepted -- just like Decimal. Even now, after a couple of releases with Decimal in the library, there remains much opposition to a Decimal built-in, not even talking about Decimal literals. -- Aahz ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ "Typing is cheap. Thinking is expensive." --Roy Smith -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
