On 11/10/12 09:56, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
I gave this idea +float('inf') in the other thread and was thinking about it since. I am now toying with the idea to unify float and decimal in Python. IEEE combined their two FP standards in one recently, so we have a precedent for this.
We can start by extending decimal to support radix 2 and once that code is mature enough and has accelerated code for platform formats (single, double, long double),
I don't want to be greedy, but supporting minifloats would be a real boon to beginners trying to learn how floats work.
we can replace Python float with the new fully platform independent IEEE 754 compliant implementation. We can even supply a legacy context to support some current warts.
This all sounds very exciting, but also like a huge amount of work. -- Steven