Against PEP 240

Michael Hudson mwh at python.net
Tue May 29 14:20:17 EDT 2001


"Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes:

> I'm not sure what various dialects of Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, Erlang,
> Haskell, and other non-classic languages do, but I'd bet that SOME
> of them take 7.35 as meaning 7.35 (aka 147/20, an exact rational
> number). 

None of those, anyway.  Well, I'm not absolutely *sure* about prolog,
but I'm downright certain about all of the others (if you take "Lisp"
== "Common Lisp", though I don't know of any dialect that differs
here).

Most of your examples of languages with decimal types are somewhat
long in the tooth weren't they?  Not that's conlusive proof of
anything, but suggestive.  It may just be that to get reasonable
performance on modern hardware then you want to use these "FPU"
things...

Cheers,
M.

-- 
  It's actually a corruption of "starling".  They used to be carried.
  Since they weighed a full pound (hence the name), they had to be
  carried by two starlings in tandem, with a line between them.
                 -- Alan J Rosenthal explains "Pounds Sterling" on asr



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