[Python-Dev] Re: Re: Decimal type question [Prothon] (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Aug 10 04:00:55 CEST 2004

I have been assuming that there is a fundamental need for an integer type that has no fraction. There are many places like indexing where you semantically want integers.

That doesn't necessarily mean you need an integer type. Indexing code can still reject numbers whose value isn't an integer.

There may be other reasons for wanting an integer type, though. For instance, allowing integers to become abitrarily large doesn't usually cause any problem, whereas allowing the precision of fractional numbers to increase unboundedly can lead to unexpectedly high memory consumption and slowness. So you probably want arbitrary precision integers, but not arbitrary precision fractional numbers (at least by default).

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+

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