On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 4:08 PM, Greg Ewing <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz">greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">Meador Inge wrote:<br>
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3. Using Decimal keeps the desired precision,<br>
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Well, sort of, but then you end up doing arithmetic in<br>
decimal instead of binary, which could give different<br>
results.<br></blockquote><div><br>Even with the user-defined precision capabilities of the 'Decimal' class? In other words, can I create an instance of a 'Decimal' that behaves (in all operations: arithmetic, comparison, etc...) exactly as the extended double precision type offered by a given machine?<br>
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Maybe the solution is to give ctypes long double objects<br>
the ability to do arithmetic?<br></blockquote><div><br>Maybe, but then we would have to give all numeric 'ctypes' the ability to do arithmetic -- which may be more than we want.<br><br><br>-- Meador<br></div></div>