Chris Angelico wrote:
It seems strange to smoothly slide from native integer to long integer and just keep on going, and yet to be unable to do the same if there's a fractional part on it.
The trouble is that if you always compute exact results by default, the number of digits required can blow up very quickly. There's a story that ABC (the predecessor to Python) calculated everything using rationals. People found that sometimes a calculation would take an unexpectedly long time, and it turned out to be because internally it was creating fractions with huge numerators and denominators. As a consequence, Guido decided that Python would *not* use rationals by default. The same problem doesn't arise with ints, because the only time you get an int with a large number of digits is when you genuinely need a large int. So expanding ints automatically to however many digits is needed doesn't do any harm. In Python 2.6 and later, there's a fractions module for when you need it. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
