[Python-Dev] Google Summer of Code proposal: improvement of long int and adding new types/modules. (original) (raw)

Mateusz Rukowicz mateusz.rukowicz at vp.pl
Fri Apr 21 18:52:13 CEST 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:

(Aside: you probably mean physicist, someone who practices physics. A physician is a doctor; don't ask me why. :-)

;) I'll remember ;)

interpreted languages are particularly good for physics simulations, in which small error would grow so much, that results are useless.

We already have decimal floating point which can be configured to use however many digits of precision you want. Would this be sufficient? If you want more performance, perhaps you could tackle the very useful project of translating decimal.py into C? Yes, it seems like better idea - already written software would benefit that transparently. I think I could develop 'margin' ideas later.

I'm not sure I see the value of rational numbers implemeted in C; they're easy to write in Python and all the time goes into division of two ints which is already implemented in C.

Well, quite true ;P

Have you looked at the existing wrappers around OpenSSL, such as pyopenssl and m2crypto? ISTM that these provide most of the needed algorithms, already coded in open source C.

Well, you already convinced me to not do that right now, but I still think python would benefit that, and it would be done later on, but this discussion may be moved in time.

I understand that most of these improvements have quite limited audience, but I still think python should be friendly to them ;)

Sure. The question is, if there are more student applications than Google wants to fund, which projects will be selected? I would personally vote for the projects that potentially help out the largest number of Python users. So I think the most valuable of my ideas would be improving long int + coding decimal in C. Anyway, I think it would be possible to add other ideas later.

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