How about adding rational fraction to Python?

[D'Arcy J.M. Cain]

On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:10:13 -0800 (PST)
Carl Banks <pavlovevidence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 28, 3:30 am, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr... at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >         Automatic conversions, okay... but converting a result when all
> > inputs are of one time, NO...
> 
> People, this is so cognitive dissonance it's not even funny.

I'll say.

> There is absolutely nothing obvious about 1/2 returning a number that
> isn't at least approximately equal to one half.  There is nothing self-
> evident about operations maintaining types.

Not obvious to you.  You are using subjective perception as if it was a
law of nature.  If "obvious" was the criteria then I would argue that
the only proper result of integer division is (int, int).  Give me the
result and the remainder and let me figure it out.

> You people can't tell the difference between "obvious" and "learned
> conventions that came about because in limitations in the hardware at
> the time".  Nobody would have come up with a silly rule like "x op y
> must always have the same type as x and y" if computer hardware had
> been up to the task when these languages were created.

What makes you say they weren't?  Calculating machines that handled
floating point are older than Python by far.

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy at druid.net>         |  Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/                |  and a sheep voting on
+1 416 425 1212     (DoD#0082)    (eNTP)   |  what's for dinner.