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<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT><BR><FONT size=2 face=Arial>[Glyph Lefkowitz
]<BR>> This reasoning definitely makes sense to me; with all the
dependency-migration </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>> issues 3.x could definitely use some
carrots. However, I don't think I agree with it, </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>> because this doesn't feel like a big new
feature, just some behavior which has changed. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>The carrots/incentives idea also sounds
specious to me. </FONT><FONT size=2 face=Arial>First of all, I consider it
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>to be more of a bug fix than a feature --
we've had </FONT><FONT size=2 face=Arial>plenty of bug reports and
confusion</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>surrounding the </FONT><FONT size=2
face=Arial>current implementation and at least one of my scripts is broken
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>(occasionally giving wrong answers </FONT><FONT
size=2 face=Arial>and the same also is true for decimal.__float__
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>method being similarly afflicted). Our
current dependency on a badly implemented </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>libc strtod() function </FONT><FONT size=2
face=Arial>is not a good thing (and not consistent across various
Python builds). </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Second, as Glyph </FONT><FONT size=2
face=Arial>points out, the change </FONT><FONT size=2 face=Arial>is too small of
an improvement to be a real carrot.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>One quick thought on the doctest issue. If
the doctests are being used as originally</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>intended (as part of validating examples in
docstrings), then consider that the docstrings</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>themselves would actually be improved with the
shorter repr. IMO, it significantly</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>detracts from examples if they are afflicted with
floating point repr issues:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial> def
average(seq):<BR> """ Return the
arithmetic mean of a sequence.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>
>>> average([0.1,
0.5])<BR>
0.29999999999999999<BR> <BR>
"""</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>
return sum(seq) / float(len(seq))</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Wouldn't this example be much nicer if it returned
0.3 ?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Raymond</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>