[Python-Dev] PEP 0484 - the Numeric Tower
Steven D'Aprano
steve at pearwood.info
Tue Oct 13 20:08:07 EDT 2015
On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 04:37:43PM -0700, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
> We could have (and still could) make the choice to always coerce to
> decimal (every float is exactly representable in decimal). Further,
> any decimal float or binary float could be losslessly coerced to a
> Fraction, but that probably isn't what you really want most of the
> time. I think people who work in decimal usually want to stay there
> and people who work with binary floating point want to stay there as
> well (invisible coercions being more likely to cause pain than relieve
> pain).
Further to what Raymond says, if anyone wants to persue this further,
and wants to argue for such automatic promotion of float to Decimal (or
vice versa), I think a good place to start would be a survey of other
languages with a numeric tower. How do they handle similar situations?
--
Steve
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