A rational proposal

[Tim Peters]

[Jp Calderone]
...
>  The Decimal type seems to define min and max so that NaNs
> can be treated specially, but I glean this understanding from only
> a moment of reading decimal.py.  Perhaps someone more well
> informed can declare definitively the purpose of these methods.

To conform to the semantics of the min and max operations defined in
IBM's proposed standard for decimal arithmetic:

    http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/

and in particular:

    http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/daops.html#refmax
and
    http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/daops.html#refmin

Note that this is a moving target.