On 11 October 2012 06:45, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
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.
Are you sure there would be any point in this? People who specifically *want* base-2 floats are probably quite happy with the current float type, and wouldn't appreciate having it slowed down, even by a small amount.
It might make sense for them to share whatever parts of the fp context apply to both, and they might have a common base type, but they should probably remain distinct types with separate implementations.
This is what I was pitching at. It would be great if a single floating point context could be used to control the behaviour of float, decimal, ndarray etc simultaneously. Something that would have made my life easier yesterday would have been a way to enter a debugger at the point when a first NaN is created during execution. Something like: python -m pdb --error-nan broken_script.py Or perhaps: PYTHONRUNFIRST='import errornan' python broken_script.py With numpy you can already do: export PYTHONRUNFIRST='imoprt numpy; numpy.seterr(all='raise')' (Except that PYTHONRUNFIRST isn't implemented yet: http://bugs.python.org/issue14803) Oscar