[Python-ideas] Including elementary mathematical functions in the python data model (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sun Sep 26 14:07:50 CEST 2010

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 9:05 PM, Mark Dickinson <dickinsm at gmail.com> wrote:

A less invasive proposal would be just to introduce sin, etc. magic methods and have math.sin delegate to .sin;  i.e., have math.sin work in exactly the same way that math.floor and math.ceil currently work.  That would be quite nice for e.g., the decimal module:  you'd be able to write something like:

from math import sqrt root = (-b + sqrt(bb - 4ac)) / (2a) to compute the root of a quadratic equation, and it would work regardless of whether a, b, c were Decimal instances or floats. I'm not sure how I feel about the entailed magic method explosion, though.

Couple that with the extra function call overhead (since these wouldn't have real typeslots) and it still seems like a less than stellar idea.

As another use case for solid, efficient generic function support though... great idea :)

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

More information about the Python-ideas mailing list