On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 4:26 AM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
> Does this mean we want to re-open the discussion about decimal constants?
> Last time this came up I think we decided that we wanted to wait for
> cdecimal (which is obviously here) and work out how to handle contexts, the
> syntax, etc.

Just to throw a crazy idea out: How bad a change would it be to make
decimal actually the default?

(Caveat: I've not worked with decimal/cdecimal to any real extent and
don't know its limitations etc.)

Painful for existing code, unittests and extension modules. Definitely python-ideas territory (thread moved there with an appropriate subject).

I'm not surprised at all that a decimal type can be "fast" in an interpreted language due to the already dominant interpreter overhead.

I wish all spreadsheets had used decimals from day one rather than binary floating point (blame Lotus?). Think of the trouble that would have saved the world.

-gps