On Thursday, March 6, 2014 6:36:46 AM UTC-6, Stefan Krah wrote:

As I understand, you are suggesting some kind of number system with
symbolic representations that can be converted to decimal if needed.

The topic is so vast that the only chance of it happening is for
someone to provide an implementation on PyPI and see if people
like it. There are packages for symbolic mathematics like sympy,
perhaps that is a start.

Yes, that is correct (in a way). I will respond to this better when

I respond to Guido, so be sure to read that post.

Regarding decimal literals:

Possible in 3.x, but it would require some investigation if
people really want arbitrary precision arithmetic by default
rather than e.g. IEEE Decimal64.

Good. Dialogue is a good thing. Looking forward to it.

Regarding decimal floats by default:

Perhaps in 4.0, but IMO only with *full* backing by the large SciPy
and NumPy communities. My guess is that it's not going to happen, not
in the least because the literature for floating point algorithms
(with proofs!) has an overwhelming focus on binary floating point.

I know. Again, when I respond to Guido I'll address this a bit.

Thanks Stefan, I appreciate your inputs, and your work... keep it up!

marcus