float / double support in Python?

[Martijn Faassen]

Brandon Van Every <vanevery at 3dprogrammer.com> wrote:
> If the community retains a provincial interest, rather than noticing what
> the language is actually getting used for and what certain people want, then
> the community will not grow.  It will not receive mainstream attention, and
> it will become a "coulda woulda shoulda" language.  Compared to mainstream
> offerings like Java, Perl, and C#, the future of Python is far from secure.

So is Python's future insecure because it doesn't support basic machine
types as native types? I suggest you take a look at Perl, which future
apparently is secure, and has a scalar type which doesn't even distinguish
between strings and integers. :)

Anyway, Python's future is secure and has grown more mainstream day by
day for as long as I've been using it (since '98). In '98 nobody had
heard about it. Now I'd say a large amount of programmers have. In '98
there were one or two books about the language; I think now you could 
fill a few shelves with them.

You state Python's community retains a provincial interest and does not
notice what the language actually gets used for and what certain people
want. Could you point out another example except your own? (C++ programmer
with a performance mindset blundering onto comp.lang.python without doing
much research or experimentation, a slightly doubtful addition to our
user community ;)

Obviously I am not stating that Python does everything perfectly. This is
why there are all kinds of initiatives in the Python community to 
make things work better, this being open source.

Perhaps you should join one of the initiatives interested in 
supporting machine types, or if none of these pleases you, start your own.
It is certainly possible to write a Python extension
that supports floats.

Of course the way Python implements any object may be too
slow for you, as they're still reference counted objects and references
to them get passed around. In that case you may want to join one of the
initiatives that are investigating optimizing the interpreter (or creating
wholly new ones). Those are of course far more experimental and they may
result in nothing (or nothing very soon), but that's the way the process
works.

So perhaps your worries are based on a lack of research and experimentation 
more so than a real problem with the community here? 

Regards,

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?