[Python-Dev] return type of complex (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sun Oct 21 14:23:29 CEST 2012

Greg Ewing writes:

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

It's a design bug, yes. The question is, does it conform to documented behavior?

The 2.7 docs say this about complex:

Called to implement the built-in function complex() ...
Should return a value of the appropriate type.

So the question is whether float is an "appropriate type" when you're expecting a complex.

I probably not say that, but even so my personal taste would be to fix the docs to describe the current behavior in 2.7. Evidently somebody thought "float" was appropriate, or they would have just written "Returns a complex value." Stability is more important than catering to my taste (even if it happens to represent a majority in some sense).

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