On Fri, 20 May 2011 16:54:06 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: > If someone has time to kill (as if!), it'd be awesome to get a new > numeric type that uses bc's code; any other numeric type (int, long, > float) could autopromote to it, removing the dilemma of which to promote > out of long and float. Hmm... Python 4.0, 'bc' is the new default > integer and everything else is a performance optimization? Heh.
The problem is, it isn't *just* a performance optimization, there is a semantic difference too. Consider: >>> x = 1e-300 >>> x*x == 0 True But using something with more precision: >>> from fractions import Fraction >>> x = Fraction(10)**-300 >>> x*x == 0 False So you get different behaviour between floats and arbitrary precision numbers. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
