[Python-Dev] Expert floats (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Mar 31 00:59:35 EST 2004

"Andrew P. Lentvorski, Jr." <bsder at allcaps.org>:

My question is: Is it possible that a C implementation of Decimal would be almost as fast as native floating point in Python for reasonable digit lengths and settings? (ie. use native FP as an approximation and then do some tests to get the last digit right).

That sounds like an extremely tricky thing to do, and it's not immediately obvious that it's even possible.

But maybe it would still be "fast enough" doing it all properly in decimal?

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+

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