Against PEP 240

Paul Prescod paulp at ActiveState.com
Tue May 29 12:04:18 EDT 2001


This seems like a pretty emotional argument to me. I don't see any
technical justifications.

Robin Becker wrote:
> 
> I am strongly opposed to the intent of PEP 240. I would prefer the
> literal floats to remain. Let those that want infinite precision pay the
> price by adding an 'R' to their literals. 

Why should those that want correct answers pay the syntactic price
rather than those that want performance?

> This PEP seems purely biassed
> towards the needs of naive programmers and I feel that is wrong; this
> whole industry has grown up with the old style (and coped quite well).
> If naive users are to be the only designers we'll end up badly.

Naive users are not the only design target but I think that there is a
certain logic in preserving the *simplest syntax* for the naive users
and using more sophisticated syntaxes for more complicated ideas.

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