prePEP: Decimal data type

[Aahz]

In article <jeQr/ks/Kz6B089yn at the-wire.com>,
Mel Wilson <mwilson at the-wire.com> wrote:
>In article <vqgapfommnh7db at news.supernews.com>,
>"John Roth" <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> wrote:
>>
>>My personal opinion in the matter is that setting the precision
>>high enough so that you won't get into trouble is a hack, and it's
>>a dangerous hack because the amount of precision needed isn't
>>directly related to the data you're processing; it's something that
>>came out of an analysis, probably by someone else under some other
>>circumstances. Given a software implementation, there's a performance
>>advantage to setting it as low as possible, which immediately puts
>>things at risk if your data changes.
>
>   It puzzles me.  In the COBOL days, we used to worry over setting the
>sizes of our data fields large enough.  We'd set a size we thought was
>ridiculously large and then worry whether today would be the day that
>the company would do the unprecedented amount of business that would
>blow up the night-shift batch runs.  We escaped from that with Python's
>long ints and now we're trying to invent it again.

Division is the fly in the ointment, unfortunately.  The other operations
lead to unbounded-but-finite number sets; division leads to infinite size
unless truncated or rounded.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"It is easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code."
--Bill Harlan