proposed language change to int/int==float (was: PEP0238 lament)

[David Eppstein]

In article <ygey9p9yf4x.fsf at asfast.com>, Lloyd Zusman <ljz at asfast.com> 
wrote:

> Accountants and their kin want ledgers, positions, etc. to balance to
> the penny (or centavo, or whatever is the smallest fractional currency
> in a given country).  This can only be accomplished using decimal
> arithmetic ... like Bignums with implied decimal places.
> 
> I believe that this kind of exact decimals would be very useful,
> although I agree that there should be some new way to represent these
> values (so that 0.98 in a Python program would still be considered a
> float).

The dollar sign is still unused, right?

0.98 can return a float
$0.98 can return a decimal

Or does using that character remind people too much of Perl...
-- 
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
eppstein at ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/