On 25 December 2016 at 09:48, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
Or maybe make it so that even no-fpectl builds still export the
necessary symbols so that yes-fpectl extensions don't crash on import?
(This has the advantage that it can be done in a point release...)
This seems like a sensible thing to do in 3.6, 3.5 and 2.7 regardless of what happens in 3.7.
For 3.7, I don't understand the trade-offs well enough to have a strong opinion, but dropping the feature entirely does seem reasonable - folks that want fine-grained floating point exception control these days are likely to be much better served by the decimal module, or one of the third party computing libraries (numpy, gmpy, sympy, etc).
There was a thread back in 2012 [1] regarding the possibility of instead updating floats to offer flexibility similar to that offered by those other modules, but I think our discussions of the expected semantics of a decimal literal show that that would be a bad idea - context dependent behaviour in numeric literals creates all sorts of problems at the level of compiler and interpreter design.