It's way too late in the 3.0 release cycle, but feel free to submit a patch for inclusion into 2.7 and 3.1. On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 12:01 PM, Rocco Orlando Rossi <rocco.rossi@gmail.com> wrote:
I appreciate the inclusion of the fractions module in Python 2.6 and therefore in Python 3.0. But I feel there's something missing: no possibility for complex rationals (or arbitrary precision) integers. I was just checking the complex number support in Python, compared, for instance, to Common Lisp and Scheme, and I realized that there was this subtle omission. The inclusion of rationals and arbitrary integers is cool, but the numeric tower (say, compared to Scheme) is not complete. I don't think there would be a performance hit if complex rationals were provided. Ordinary operations on complex floats, in theory, should not be affected and handled separately. But it would be nice to be able to do:
(3/4 + 1/2j) * (1/4 - j) = 11/16 - 5/8j
with no loss of precision.
Python is heavily used in math and science all over the world. We've even got a recent symbolic math project (sympy) that looks very promising, so I guess this could be an important issue.
Note: there exists a library that implements what I'm talking about: http://calcrpnpy.sourceforge.net/clnum.html but still I personally would have liked to see this stuff included natively in the new Python 3.0. _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)