[Python-Dev] Tuples vs. lists (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal@lemburg.com
Tue, 05 Feb 2002 18:25:16 +0100

Aahz Maruch wrote:

M.-A. Lemburg wrote: > > For the BCD stuff Aahz was talking about, I'd suggest to have > a look at either arrays or cStringIO buffers. cStringIO wouldn't work because I want to store ints.

I was thinking of storing integers as chr(value) in these.

Arrays might work, but I think I'll stick with tuples because they're a bit more familiar to most Pythonistas. I'm not too concerned with raw speed and efficiency before I convert the code to C; remember Knuth.

If you plan to convert this to C, why not have a look at mxNumber first ? It's a wrapper around GMP and provides high performance implementations for many numeric operations, e.g. it should be easy to create a BCD type using the GMP (arbitrary length) longs and an additional C long for the decimal point position. In fact, there's a GMP extension MPFR which tries to do just this.

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