[Python-Dev] Decimal & amp; lt; -& amp; gt; float comparisons in py3k. (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sat Mar 20 23:43:01 CET 2010

Glenn Linderman wrote:

One can argue that either way, that it is completely different, or completely the same.

An important difference is that there is no intermediate type that can be compared with both ints and strings.

Another relevant difference is that numbers are just one of many possible things that a string could be interpreted as representing. Decimals, on the other hand, are just numbers and nothing else.

(Even strings which happen to look like numbers might not be -- e.g. telephone "numbers", which are better thought of as strings with a limited character set... despite some misguided souls occasionally storing them in floating point. :-)

-- Greg

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