[Python-Dev] Backporting Decimal

[Mark Dickinson]

On 10/2/07, Facundo Batista <facundobatista at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 2007/10/2, Raymond Hettinger <python at rcn.com>:
>
> > Yes!  We have guaranteed that spec updates are to be treated as bug
> fixes and backported.  This is especially important in this case
> > because other errors have been fixed and the test cases have grown.
>
> Perfect! I'll backport it to 2.5... what about 2.4?


There's one potential breakage that I see here:  the Decimal.__pow__
function has different semantics in the new version of Decimal (nonintegers
are now allowed as exponents; some previous restrictions on argument sizes
no longer exist), so backporting the new version of __pow__ might cause
difficulties.  In particular, some cases of three-argument pow that
previously worked (giving arguably nonsensical results) will now raise an
exception.  To be honest, I'd be quite surprised to find that *anyone* was
using the three-argument pow, but perhaps we should be careful here?

Mark
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