[Python-Dev] C Decimal - is there any interest?

[Steve Holden]

Facundo Batista wrote:
> 2007/10/15, Mateusz Rukowicz <mateusz.rukowicz at vp.pl>:
> 
>>     I've been working on C decimal project during gSoC 2006. After year
>> of idling (I had extremely busy first year on University, but well, most
>> of us are extremely busy) I decided, that I will handle further
> 
> Welcome back, :)
> 
> 
>> merging C Decimal with main tree are much lower than year ago, so I
>> would like to know if there is still interest in C version of Decimal.
>> If so - should I write PEP, or just code and 'we'll see later'?
> 
> First of all you need to address some issues raised by some people
> here after you finished your work last year. I remember of Raymond
> Hattinger, but maybe there were others.
> 
> After that, you should update the C version to comply the spec in its
> last version.
> 
> Now that we have more prefixes in Py3k (0b110101, for example), we can
> push to have something like 0d1.34. Or even that 1.34 is decimal by
> default, and have a 0f1.34 if you want binary floating point. Or that
> that behaviour is selectable system wide somehow. What people do you
> think is the future here?
> 
I think you should forget any idea of making decimal the default numeric 
literal type (and anyway would you do that only for literals containing 
decimal points?).

Using a radix notation for literals would, IMHO, be acceptable if you 
can get the idea accepted (it is, after all, only syntactic sugar with a 
little memory saving and the transfer of some computation to compile time).
> 
>> I've made a little benchmark - given loan amount, assets and months that
>> it's meant to be payed off, find minimal monthly loan cost (It's just
> 
> I will prepare, just for decimal.py, a benchmark that is a mix of all
> operations and use (a mix of common operations like add, not so used
> ones like log10, context switching, exceptions raised, etc).  You can
> use this if you want, to measure also the difference in speed from Py
> to C. Note, however, that you need to update it first for the last
> spec.
> 
regards
  Steve
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Sorry, the dog ate my .sigline so I couldn't cat it