Terry Reedy wrote:
On 6/24/2010 1:38 PM, Bill Janssen wrote:
We have separate types for int, float, Decimal, etc. But they're all numbers, and they all cross-operate.
No they do not. Decimal only mixes properly with ints, but not with anything else
I think there are also some important differences between numbers and strings concerning how they interact with C code. In C there are really only two choices for representing a Python number in a way that C code can directly operate on -- long or double -- and there is a set of functions for coercing a Python object into one of these that C code almost universally uses. So a new number type only has to implement the appropriate conversion methods to be usable by all of that C code. On the other hand, the existing C code that operates on Python strings often assumes that it has a particular internal representation. A new abstract string-access API would have to be devised, and all existing C code updated to use it. Also, this new API would not be as easy to use as the number API, because it would involve asking for the data in some specified encoding, which would require memory allocation and management. -- Greg