PEP239 (Rational Numbers) Reference Implementation and new issues

[Erik Max Francis]

Charles Krug wrote:

> If you're writing a rational class, I think it's perfectly reasonable
> in all
> cases to return a rational number, as well as to offer conversion
> operators
> into both float and q, r representations.

The problem is that the numerator and denominator can silently get huge,
resulting in progressively worse performance.  This is especially bad in
the case where this conversion is happening behind the scenes --
suddenly performance starts suffering and no code has changed.

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 Erik Max Francis / max at alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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