[Python-Dev] Decimal(unicode)

[Mark Dickinson]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 4:46 AM, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:

> As Nick said, a drop-in replacement in C isn't feasible
>
> But probably users of decimal won't really care if they have to slightly
> adapt their code if they get the speed increase instead.
>
> We had a SOC student working on decimal-c in the past, so it shouldn't be
> totally dead. What about this year's SOC?
>

I worry that rewriting Decimal in C in its entirety would make it
significantly harder to maintain.  The IBM Decimal Specification
hasn't stabilised yet:  there's another update to it expected some
time after IEEE 754r is finally approved, so there are probably
still significant changes to be made to Decimal in the future.

I know that I would have contributed a lot less to Decimal had
it been written in C, simply because it would have taken me
much more time to understand and modify the code.

Mark
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