Nick Maclaren wrote:The decimal spec was designed to encompass both floating-point and fixed-point.Well, maybe. There are other approaches, too, and Decimal has its problems with that. In particular, when people need precisely defined decimal rounding, they ALWAYS need fixed-point and not floating-point. Hogwash. The only issues with decimal are ease-of-use and speed.(Note that I don't care all that much about round(), but I do think we want to canonicalize Decimal() for all purposes in standard Python where people care about accuracy. Additional float features can go into NumPy.)Really? That sounds like dogma, not science.Decimal doesn't even help people who care about accuracy. At most (and with the reservation mentioned above), it means that you can can map external decimal formats to internal ones without loss of precision. Not a big deal, as there ARE no requirements for doing that for floating-point, and there are plenty of other solutions for fixed-point. People who care about the accuracy of calculations prefer binary, as it is a more accurate model. That isn't a big deal, either. Raymond |
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