[Python-Dev] New operations in Decimal (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Thu May 10 23:24:57 CEST 2007

"Facundo Batista" <facundo at taniquetil.com.ar> wrote in message news:f18754$2c2$1 at sea.gmane.org... | Nick Maclaren wrote: || > Am I losing my marbles, or is this a proposal to add the logical | > operations to FLOATING-POINT? || Sort of. This is a proposal to keep compliant with the General Decimal | Arithmetic Specification, as we promised. || http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/

I oppose adding this illogical nonsense to Python. Who would ever use it?

An intention and promise to keep compliant with a decimal arithmetic standard cannot sanely be a blind, open-ended promise to add whatever non-decimal functions that IBM puts where they do not belong as part of its commercial strategem. To me, the same would go for any other standard similarly twisted.

Supposed IBM defined a mapping between pairs of decimal digits and an ascii subset (printables and the few control chars actually used by most people). Suppose IBM further defined string functions for decimal nuumbers intrerpreted as strings. An example might be 'capitalize', such that capitalize(010203) == 010203 capitalize(121110) == 424140 # 10='a', 40 = 'A', etc And suppose that IBM shoved this into the decimal standard the same way it did with the decimal-interpreded-as-binary-string' functions. Would you really add them to be 'compliant' with IBM?

If you really do put them in, turn 'invert' into 'prefix_not'. For the prefix, please not 'logical' but something like 'lu' (for 'lunatic') or, less provocatively, 'ibm'.

Terry Jan Reedy

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