[Python-Dev] Re: Decimal data type issues (original) (raw)

Michael Chermside mcherm at mcherm.com
Fri Apr 23 09:10:10 EDT 2004

Tim Peters writes:

BTW, note that the spec has nothing to say about how an implementation spells anything, except for the results of the to-string operations. That is, there's no requirement to call the spec's quantize operation "quantize"; the requirement is to provide something with the semantics of the spec's quantize operation.

Without having given it a LOT of thought, I'm in favor of calling it "quantize" just to match the name in the spec. Without deciding it yet, there are good reasons to think we MIGHT want the behavior of "round" to be somewhat different (eg: match the behavior of Python's round()) if that were supported in the future.

For example, roundlike() or rescale() might be friendlier names (in fact, the current quantize used to be called rescale in the spec).

Yes, but there are ALSO notes in the spec explaining that they changed the name from rescale to quantize because people had misleading preconceptions about what "rescale" would do. (Partly because it worked differently in previous versions of the spec.)

-- Michael Chermside

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