(in)exactness of complex numbers

[Greg Ewing]

"David C. Ullrich" wrote:
> 
> But why should the real and imag of a complex be required to be
> floats in the first place? Why  shouldn't they be allowed to be
> floats or rationals or integers?

A complex number, in the mathematical sense, is 
not a pair of other numbers -- that's just one 
way of *representing* a complex number.

If you have some application for which you
need pairs of numbers that are restricted to
being integers or whatever, they're not really
complex numbers, and so you can't blame Python's
complex type for not helping you.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury,	  
Christchurch, New Zealand
To get my email address, please visit my web page:	  
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg