[Python-Dev] basenumber redux

[Guido van Rossum]

On 1/15/06, Alex Martelli <aleaxit at gmail.com> wrote:
> Now, today, I have _again_ been bit by the lack of basenumber (by a
> bug of mine, fixed by adding decimal.Decimal to a long tuple of
> classes to be passed to an isinstance call -- I hadn't run that
> particular numeric code of mine since the time of Python 2.3,
> apparently), so I'm back to pining for it.

As you already suspected, I think a PEP is needed. The intent of
basestring was to *only* be used as the base class for *built-in*
string types. Clearly what you're proposing is different (Decimal is
not built-in -- not yet anyway).

Like other posters, I suspect that the best way of detecting numbers
might be some other kind of test, not necessarily a call to
isinstance().

It would also help to explain the user case more. ("I've been bitten"
doesn't convey a lot of information. :-)

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)