On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 3:38 AM, Mark H Harris <harrismh...@gmail.com> wrote: > 'Useful' must always be taken in context, and also contextually evaluated > with an on-going methodology which constantly informs 'usefulness' on a > continuum. I admire and encourage the core devs, in their pursuit of > excellence. Asking 'what is the practical use case?' is essential. Not > always is the answer complete. > On the python unicode continuum version (3) is more useful than version > (2). ( this is of course relative and debatable, so the statement is > rhetorical ) The commitment and dedicated effort to move forward with a > unicode default is not only commendable, but also admits to the 'usefulness' > of same. Its not that version 2 was useless, its just that version 3 is so > much more useful that people are 'using' it and dedicating their resources > moving forward with python3. > This is similar to the decimal module. Of course it had limited > usefulness in version(2) thru 3.2/ but now, python3.3+ the decimal module > is truly useful! Why? Glad you asked... because it is now fast enough for > use cases previously reserved for floats. I found limited usefulness for > decimal prior to 3.3, but now we're finding decimal so useful that some of > us are wanting decimal to be the default. ( all of this is also relative and > debatable )
So your definition of "useful" for the Decimal module is "fast" and your definition of "useful" for Unicode is "mandated into use". Neither of those is how any dictionary I know defines that word, and you're not even consistent (since you said Unicode became useful at 3.0, which didn't - AFAIK - improve its performance any, while 3.3 did (PEP 393)). Here's one definition: "able to be used for a practical purpose or in several ways". Does not say anything about performance. Python is useful in that I am able to wield it to solve my problems. I don't care that it's slower than C; in fact, a lot of the problems I solve with Python are interactive, and run to completion faster than I can notice them. If I use decimal.Decimal or fractions.Fraction in my code, it is not because it's fast or slow or anything, it is because that type matches what I want to do with it. Those types are useful to me because there are situations in which they match my problem. While I am interested in seeing a Decimal literal syntax in Python, and I would support a shift to have "1.2" evaluate as a Decimal (but not soon - it'd break backward compat *hugely*), I do not by any means believe that Decimal will only become useful when it's the default non-integer type in source code. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
