On 9 March 2014 20:39, Guido van Rossum
On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 1:07 PM, Oscar Benjamin
wrote: The problem though is with things like +3.14d or -3.14d. Python the language treats the + and - signs as not being part of the literal but as separate unary operators. This is unimportant for int, float and imaginary literals because there unary + is a no-op and unary - is exact. For decimal this is not the same as +Decimal('3.14') is not the same as Decimal('+3.14'):
Any solutions you are going to come up with would cause other anomalies such as -(5d) not being equal to -5d. My vote goes to treating + and - as the operators they are and telling people that if they want a negative constant that exceeds the context's precision they're going to have to use Decimal('-N'), rather than adding a terrible hack to the parser (and hence to the language spec).
I think it's reasonable that -(5d) not be equal to -5d. Expert users would exploit this behaviour the same way that they currently exploit unary + for rounding to context. I don't think that non-expert users would write that by mistake. I'm also not that bothered about +5d rounding to context since the + is optional and current users of the decimal module would probably expect that to round. What I dislike about this is that it would mean that negative decimal literals were essentially unsafe. It seems okay if you assume that the precision is 28 or higher but users can set it to a lower value and decimal contexts are unscoped so they have action at a distance on other code. So if I have a module libmod.py with: # libmod.py def libfunc(): a = -1.23465789d return f(a) Then I have a script: # script.py from decimal import localcontext import libmod with localcontext() as ctx: ctx.prec = 5 b = libmod.libfunc() I think we could easily get into a situation where the author of libmod just assumes that the decimal context has enough precision and the author of script.py doesn't realise the effect that their change of context has on libmod. These kinds of things are generally problematic when using the decimal module and the solution is typically that libfunc needs to take control of the context. I think that it would be particularly surprising with decimal literals though. The change in the precision of "a" above might be a harmless reduction in the precision of the result or it could lead to an infinite loop or basically anything else depending on what libmod uses the value for.
BTW Do you why the default precision is 28?
I have no idea. The standards I've read describe a few particular 9 digit contexts that should be provided by a conforming implementation and decimal provides them but neither is the default:
import decimal decimal.BasicContext.prec 9 decimal.ExtendedContext.prec 9
AFAIK there's no standard that suggests 28 digits. There are other common contexts such as decimal32 (7 digits), decimal64 (16 digits), and decimal128 (34 digits) and these are the contexts that Java's BigDecimal provides (as well as an "unlimited" context). Oscar