[Python-Dev] Decimal <-> float comparisons in py3k. (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sat Mar 20 20:56:24 CET 2010

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 4:16 AM, Mark Dickinson <dickinsm at gmail.com> wrote:

True.  The reason I was concentrating on the hashes is that it's not immediately obvious that it's even possible to find a decent hash function that's efficient to compute and gives equal results for numerically equal inputs (regardless of type); this is especially true if you don't want to significantly slow down the existing hashes for int and float.  But once that problem is solved, it shouldn't be too hard to implement all the comparisons.

It is kinda messy, because as far as I can see the oddities of the various types mean that you end up producing specialized code for comparing each pair of types (one block of code for float<->Fraction comparisons, another for float<->Decimal, yet another for Decimal<->Fraction, and so on), but it's doable.

I propose to reduce all hashes to the hash of a normalized fraction, which we can define as a combination of the hashes for the numerator and the denominator. Then all we have to do is figure fairly efficient ways to convert floats and decimals to normalized fractions (not necessarily Fractions). I may be naive but this seems doable: for a float, the denominator is always a power of 2 and removing factors of 2 from the denominator is easy (just right-shift until the last bit is zero). For Decimal, the unnormalized denominator is always a power of 10, and the normalization is a bit messier, but doesn't seem excessively so. The resulting numerator and denominator may be large numbers, but for typical use of Decimal and float they will rarely be excessively large, and I'm not too worried about slowing things down when they are (everything slows down when you're using really large integers anyway).

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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