[Python-Dev] Sort out formatting differences in decimal and float (original) (raw)

Daniel Fetchinson fetchinson at googlemail.com
Sat Dec 5 15:00:34 CET 2009

Sorry for being a curmudgeon, however...

>>> format(Decimal(1234), '020,g') '0,000,000,000,001,234' >>> format(Decimal(1234), '0=20,g') '0000000000000001,234' Why in the world would you ever want to insert commas as separators and not use them consistently? >>> format(Decimal('nan'), '020,g') ' NaN' >>> format(Decimal('nan'), '0=20,g') '00000000000000000NaN' Why in the world would you ever want to zero pad Nan (or Inf, for that matter)?

Because you didn't know in advance that the number ending up in your format call was a nan (or inf)?

Cheers, Daniel

Stefan> The advantage of decimal is that the user has the option to Stefan> suppress commas. The behaviour of float is slightly easier to Stefan> implement in C.

Why? If the user asked for them why would you want to suppress (some of) them?

-- Psss, psss, put it down! - http://www.cafepress.com/putitdown

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