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

Mark Dickinson dickinsm at gmail.com
Sun Mar 21 00:46:09 CET 2010


On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 11:20 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

* Decimal and float really belong side-by-side in the tower, rather than one above the other. Neither of them is inherently any more precise or exact than the other.

Except that float is fixed-width (typically 53 bits of precision), while Decimal allows a user-specified, arbitrarily large, precision; so in that sense the two floating-point types aren't on an equal footing.

Mark



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