On Thu, 30 Aug 2018 at 08:38, Neil Girdhar <mistersh...@gmail.com> wrote: > > There are a lot of misunderstandings in this thread. It's probably best to > start by reading up on the roots of unity > (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_of_unity). The key ideas are that a real > number has two complex square roots, three complex cube roots, and so on.
The complexities of fractional powers aside, the type of a result should not depend on the values of the arguments. So I'm -1 on this change for that reason alone. Questions of which root it's appropriate to take are separate, and IMO the sensible option is to follow the behaviour of float, for which we have >>> (-1)**(2/3) (-0.4999999999999998+0.8660254037844387j) >>> (1)**(2/3) 1.0 >>> (0)**(2/3) 0.0 So current behaviour of Fraction is correct on that basis, IMO. Paul _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
