Yes, I've especially used gmpy2 and met the maintainer at a user group, worked at Mentor Graphics as I recall, and was collaborating with Alex Martelli on getting Python such a library. Most of my Jupyter Notebooks exploring high precision are using that. Trig built right in, and complex numbers.
Sage is a fantastic amalgamation of underlying tools, however I'm exploring what a plain vanilla or at most a small install of a 3rd party library (vs. a whole framework) might handle, as that lets us work in some simpler environments, maybe just a bash shell in some cases. I'm picturing tentative customers not pre-committed to using computers at all (e.g. high school math students used to Texas Instruments or maybe Casio). What's just one step away from a calculator? Calculators remain very convenient devices and are likely to stay useful in the field. I like those solar powered models. Nowadays more people emulate them on smartphones. Now that you've gone to all the trouble to upgrade to a real computer, lets at least establish you have decent power in the arbitrary precision department. What minimal setup would you need to prove that to yourself? That might help make you a convert if you're still thinking your calculator might be the more capable device to reach for. Lets do some circus tricks with Python, like 2**1000. Wow! Long integers are like a revelation. The actual answer! But can we do the same with messy decimal numbers? That's where too many settle for floating point, unnecessarily. But yes, lets not forget the towering achievements all around us here. We're indeed in a wealthy ecosystem. A lot of the barriers to adoption have to do with long ingrained habits of mind. The idea that we have both delta and lambda calculus now, i.e. the Newtonian calculus stuff and now Alan Turing and Ada stuff, is another way to help make it all one discipline, call it what you like. Kirby
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