On 12/10/12 11:04, Mark Adam wrote:
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 6:35 AM, Steven D'Aprano<steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On 11/10/12 16:45, Greg Ewing wrote:
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.
I would gladly give up a small amount of speed for better control over floats, such as whether 1/0.0 raised an exception or returned infinity.
Umm, you would be giving up a *lot* of speed. Native floating point happens right in the processor, so if you want special behavior, you'd have to take the floating point out of hardware and into "user space".
Any half-decent processor supports the IEEE-754 standard. If it doesn't, it's broken by design. Even in user-space, you're not giving up that much speed in practical terms, at least not for my needs. The new decimal module in Python 3.3 is less than a factor of 10 times slower than Python's floats, which makes it pretty much instantaneous to my mind :) numpy supports configurable numeric contexts, and I don't hear that many complaints that numpy is slower than standard Python. -- Steven
mark