On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 9:05 PM, Mark Dickinson <dickinsm@gmail.com> wrote:
A less invasive proposal would be just to introduce __sin__, etc. magic methods and have math.sin delegate to <type>.__sin__; i.e., have math.sin work in exactly the same way that math.floor and math.ceil currently work. That would be quite nice for e.g., the decimal module: you'd be able to write something like:
from math import sqrt root = (-b + sqrt(b*b - 4*a*c)) / (2*a)
to compute the root of a quadratic equation, and it would work regardless of whether a, b, c were Decimal instances or floats.
I'm not sure how I feel about the entailed magic method explosion, though.
Couple that with the extra function call overhead (since these wouldn't have real typeslots) and it still seems like a less than stellar idea. As another use case for solid, efficient generic function support though... great idea :) Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia