In truth, when I want fractions, I write: from fractions import Fraction as F
So a literal doesn't really save many characters anyway. I guess 2 characters during first use. E.g. x = F(1, 3) vs. a possible future: x = 1F / 3 The next stuff comes free either way: y = ((x / 7) + 13) * 11 On Fri, May 14, 2021, 11:38 AM Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, 14 May 2021 at 16:29, David Mertz <me...@gnosis.cx> wrote: > > > > The memory simply blows up too fast for this to be practical (at least > as a default) a float is always 64 bits, a fraction is unboundedly large if > numerator and denominator are coprime. > > > > A toy example with a half dozen operations won't make huge fractions. A > loop over a million operations will often be a gigantic memory hog. > > +1 on this. My experience has been that fraction classes are a lot > less useful in (general) practical situations than people > instinctively assume. > > > That said, Chris's idea for a literal spelling of "Fraction" is very > appealing. One extra letter or symbol could indicate that you want to work > in the Fraction domain rather than floating point. That's a perfectly > reasonable decision for a user to make. > > Agreed, it is appealing. The problem (and this is not a new > suggestion, it's come up a number of times) is that of having language > syntax depend on non-builtin classes. So either you have to *also* > propose making the fractions module a builtin, or you very quickly get > sucked into "why not make this mechanism more general, so that > libraries can define their own literals?" > > Scope creep is nearly always what kills these proposals. Or the base > proposal is too specialised to gain enough support. > > Personally, I can see value in fraction, decimal and regex literals. > But I can live without them. > > Paul >
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