[Python-Dev] proposal: add basic money type to the standard library (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal@lemburg.com
Tue, 26 Feb 2002 23:36:01 +0100

Guido van Rossum wrote:

> Indeed, monetary types solve different problems than decimal > types. Financial applications do have a need for these kind > of implicit error checks. But this is easily done by creating a custom class -- which has the advantage that the set of constraints can be specialized to the needs of a specific application. When we add a monetary type to the language we'll never get it right for all apps. OTOH, I think we could get a fixed point type right.

True.

A real implementation of a good working decimal type with adjustable rounding rules would certainly go a long way and the money type could be built on top of it.

What support for money does SQL have?

SQL-92 doesn't have support for it, but some modern database engines do, e.g. MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL (even though it's deprecated there, now), MS Access.

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