On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 12:32 AM, Ryan <rymg19@gmail.com> wrote:
> I could probably try that if you give a slightly clearer description.

Currently, you can fire up IDLE or interactive Python and use it as a
super calculator:

>>> 1 + 2
3

And when you use it with non-integers, you get floats:

>>> 0.1 + 0.2
0.30000000000000004

We could turn this into a Decimal calculator with two important changes:
1) Every instance of a number in the code must become a Decimal (which
really means wrapping every number with Decimal("...") and importing
Decimal from decimal)

2) Monkey-patch Decimal.__repr__ = Decimal.__str__ to make the display tidy

The latter might be better done by subclassing Decimal and putting
something into the builtins, but that's implementation detail (now
that Decimal is implemented in C, its attributes can't be set).

As long as you don't need multiple contexts or anything complicated
like that, this should in theory work. (Changing the default context
shouldn't break anything AFAICT.) It'd then be usable in the same way
that REXXTry is: a convenient calculator that's backed by a full
programming language. It'd be better than REXXTry, in fact, as
limitations on REXX's 'INTERPRET' command mean you can't define
functions that way (though you can call functions defined in REXXTry
itself - I had my own Enhanced REXXTry with gobs of mathematical
utility functions).

If that can be done without any core language changes, that would be awesome.

ChrisA
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