> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 1:30 PM, Carl Banks <pavlovevide...@gmail.com> wrote: > True, but why should the "non-integer number" type be floating point > rather than (say) rational?
You seem to be implying that python only provides a single non-integer numeric type. That's not true. Python ships with a bunch of different numeric types, including a rational type. Off the top of my head, we have: IEEE floating point numbers (http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#numeric-types-int-float-long-complex) Rationals (http://docs.python.org/library/fractions.html) Base-10 fixed and floating point numbers (http://docs.python.org/library/decimal.html) Complex numbers (http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#numeric-types-int-float-long-complex plus http://docs.python.org/library/cmath.html) Integers (both ints and longs, which are pretty well unified by now) Floats have far and away the best performance in most common situations, so they end up being the default, but if you want to use something different, it's usually not hard to do. -- Jerry -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
