[Python-Dev] Mixing float and Decimal -- thread reboot (original) (raw)

Jeffrey Yasskin jyasskin at gmail.com
Sun Mar 21 00:27:54 CET 2010

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 4:20 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Adam Olsen wrote:

For a little context, we have this numeric tower:

int -> Fraction -> float -> complex Decimal is more precise, and pays a performance cost for it.  It also seems odd to stick it between float and complex (nobody's planning a ComplexDecimal, right?)  That suggests it should go between Fraction and float.  Decimal/float -> float. There are two ways in which that linear tower is overly simplistic: * It conflates the notions of exactness and width. They're really orthogonal concepts, and to reflect this you would need two parallel towers, with exact and inexact versions of each type.

It's representing the mathematical concepts Integral -> Rational -> Real -> Complex

When designing it, I tried to include a notion of exact/inexact types, but we couldn't find anything practical to do with them, so we took them out. It's reasonably easy to design inexact Integral and Rational types, but pretty hard to design a useful, exact Real type (things like '==' get uncomputable quickly), so we probably couldn't actually implement two whole parallel towers.

* Decimal and float really belong side-by-side in the tower, rather than one above the other.

Yep.

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