[Python-Dev] python-dev Summary for 2004-03-01 through 2004-03-15 [rough draft] (original) (raw)

Gareth McCaughan gmccaughan at synaptics-uk.com
Mon Mar 22 04:35:59 EST 2004

On Saturday 2004-03-20, Brett Cannon wrote:

---------------------------------------------- PEP 318 and the discussion that will never end ---------------------------------------------- Just looking at the number of contributing threads to this summary should give you an indication of how talked about this PEP became. In case you don't remember the discussion last time, this PEP covers function/method(/class?) decorators: having this::

def foo() [decorate, me]: pass be equivalent to:: def foo(): pass foo = decorate(me(foo))

Although, as you say, there was some disagreement about what order of application is best, I think there was a very strong preference for the opposite order to the one you've given here.

------------------------------------------------------ Take using Python as a calculator to a whole new level ------------------------------------------------------ ... The topic of accuracy, though, was not as clear-cut. First the issue of whether to use the in-development Decimal module would be the smart thing to do. The consensus was to use Decimal since floating-point, even with IEEE 754 in place, is not accurate enough for something that wants to be as accurate as an actual calculator. Then discussions on the precision of accuracy came up. It seemed like it would be important to have a level of precision kept above the expected output precision to make sure any rounding errors and such would be kept to a minimum.

I didn't see any consensus that Decimal should be used. "Ordinary" operations (arithmetic, cos, exp, etc) in IEEE 754 double-precision are a lot more accurate than the displayed precision, or even the internal precision, on typical calculators. (It's possible that some such calculators do their internal calculations in IEEE doubles these days; I don't know.)

-- g

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