Against PEP 240

[Robin Becker]

In article <9f03m401qcu at enews2.newsguy.com>, Alex Martelli
<aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes

Well OK I accept that BCD has been used. I also in a distant past used
snobol, spitbol, pl/1 and similar. I defy anyone to claim that cobol
ever had a significant impact on thought. Of course I should wear more
flameproof clothes. 

Floating point is what it says floating point. I don't use commas. As
for being naive; I used to do the most awful assembly code to get extra
bits out of accelerated tangent series and the like. I know what an ulp
is, but I don't claim that makes me better than anyone else though. I
guess like many an old fart I long for the good old days when missiles
ruled the budgets and 60 bit fp was as good as it got. Moan whine.

My main objection is that this is likely to bust just about any
extension that uses floating point.

I'm not against using rationals. They will be slower and I'll have to
worry about that. I'll be happy if the numerical types PEP allows me
eventually to get an interval arithmetic together and or do some proper
numerical differentials (and I'm not talking about finite differences).

Of all the types I would prefer to have added the first would be a
parametrized binary fixed point.
-- 
Robin Becker