[Python-Dev] Mixing float and Decimal -- thread reboot (original) (raw)

Raymond Hettinger raymond.hettinger at gmail.com
Mon Mar 22 20:36:18 CET 2010

One other thought.

The Decimal constructor should now accept floats as a possible input type. Formerly, we separated that out to Decimal.from_float() because decimals weren't interoperable with floats.

This will put decimal and float back on equal footing so that we have both: float(some_decimal) # coerce to binary float and Decimal(some_float) # coerce to decimal float

That will also save us from odd idioms like:

d = some_float + Decimal(0)   # coerce to decimal then apply context rounding

This also matches the behavior of other constructors: int(some_float) or int(some_decimal) or str(some_float) or str(some_decimal)

Raymond

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