I sometimes find myself needing to promote[1] arbitrary numbers
(Decimals, Fractions, ints) to floats. E.g. I might say:
numbers = [float(num) for num in numbers]
or if you prefer:
numbers = map(float, numbers)
The problem with this is that if a string somehow gets into the original
numbers, it will silently be converted to a float when I actually want a
TypeError. So I want something like this:
def promote(x):
if isinstance(x, str): raise TypeError
return float(x)
but I don't like the idea of calling isinstance on every value. Is there
a better way to do this? E.g. some operation which is guaranteed to
promote any numeric type to float, but not strings?
For the record, calling promote() as above is about 7 times slower than
calling float in Python 3.3.
[1] Or should that be demote?
--
Steven
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