Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Yes, but my point (badly put, I admit) was that people find fractions far
> easier to work with than they find floating point numbers.
I'm not so sure. I got caught by the comic XKCD's
infinite-resistor-grid thing, and simplified it to a ladder network --
call it L -
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
George Sakkis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>Regardless, a builtin (or at least standard library) rational type
>would be nice to have. Of course folks that *really need* rationals
>are already using some 3rd party library, but for the rest of us it
>would be an impr
On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 22:20:22 -0800, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 06:09:06 -, Steven D'Aprano
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> declaimed the following in
> comp.lang.python:
>
>> Yes, but my point (badly put, I admit) was that people find fractions
>> far easier to work with than they f
> Rationals are not that simple.
So do complex number, in fact most people are much more familiar with
rationals/fractions than with complex number. And notice that I don't
use the word simple, I use the word elementary. Elementary doesn't
always means simple (although it usually is), but rather i
On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 17:42:26 -0800, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:42:56 -, Steven D'Aprano
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> declaimed the following in
> comp.lang.python:
>
>> In the real world, people use fractions all the time, e.g. plumbers.
>> (Not that I'm expecting plumbers to
On Dec 15, 6:52 pm, greg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> So while rationals might be useful to have available for
> some things, you should have to explicitly ask for them.
> Returning rationals from '/' applied to integers would
> be a bad idea, for example.
>From my reading of the PEP, it doesn't
On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:44:26 -0800, Arnaud Delobelle wrote:
> Rationals are not that simple.
>
> * Unless you are working under very controlled conditions, rationals
> very quickly grow enormous numerators and denominators, hence require
> arbitrary precision integers (which, I concede, are part
I think the main objection to rationals is that extensive
computation with them tends to result in numbers requiring
larger and larger amounts of storage. I believe that ABC
made routine use of rationals, and this caused programs
to get bogged down for no apparent reason, as rationals
were being us
On Dec 15, 10:38 pm, Lie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[...]
>
> Yeah, that's why I consider them too complex for being included as a
> core of a general programming language like Python. Nevertheless,
> fraction datatype _IS_ elementary enough to be included as core
> language feature.
Rationals are
On Dec 16, 4:55 am, "Fredrik Johansson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> On Dec 15, 2007 10:05 PM, Lie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Random ramble past here:
> > Actually, my vision would be not only fractions, but also rooted
> > number (square root, cube root, etc), it could be possible to
> > imp
On Dec 15, 2007 10:05 PM, Lie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Random ramble past here:
> Actually, my vision would be not only fractions, but also rooted
> number (square root, cube root, etc), it could be possible to
> implement a type where a number consist of a rooted number times a
> multiplier pl
The easiest implementation of using fractional datatype is probably to
add a new operator. Some scientific calculators provide a special
operator to signify a fraction (somewhat on the shape of a small L in
mine) and I strongly believe that their internal calculation probably
used fractions even w
On Dec 15, 2:00 pm, Lie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm very surprised actually, to see that Python rejected the use of
> fractional/rational numbers. However, when I read the PEP, I know
> exactly why the proposal was rejected: People compared fractions with
> integers, while it should be more fa
I'm very surprised actually, to see that Python rejected the use of
fractional/rational numbers. However, when I read the PEP, I know
exactly why the proposal was rejected: People compared fractions with
integers, while it should be more fairly compared to floats.
Arguments against:
- When I use t
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