On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 2:13 AM, Dave Angel <d...@davea.name> wrote: > On 10/08/2012 11:00 AM, Chris Angelico wrote: >> On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 1:48 AM, Dave Angel <d...@davea.name> wrote: >>> The Decimal class has the disadvantage that it's tons slower on any modern >>> machine I know of... >> Isn't it true, though, that Python 3.3 has a completely new >> implementation of decimal that largely removes this disadvantage? >> >> ChrisA > > I wouldn't know, I'm on 3.2. However, I sincerely doubt if it's within > a factor of 100 of the speed of the binary float, at least on > pentium-class machines that do binary float in microcode. A dozen years > or so ago, when the IEEE floating point standard was still being formed, > I tried to argue the committee into including decimal in the standard > (which they did much later). Had it been in the standard then, we MIGHT > have had decimal fp on chip as well as binary. Then again, the standard > was roughly based on the already-existing Intel 8087, so maybe it was > just hopeless. > > I guess it's possible that for some operations, the cost of the > byte-code interpreter and function lookup, etc. might reduce the > apparent penalty. Has anybody done any timings?
Try this, from python-dev list: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-September/121832.html It's not as fast as float, but it sure gives a good account for itself. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
