With Python 3.0 being released, and going over its many changes, I was reminded that decimal numbers (decimal.Decimal) are still relegated to a library and aren't built-in. Has there been any thought to adding decimal literals and making decimal a built-in type? I googled but was unable to locate any discussion of the exact issue. The closest I could find was a suggestion about making decimal the default instead of float: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2008-May/001565.html It seems that decimal arithmetic is more intuitively correct that plain floating point and floating point's main (only?) advantage is speed, but it seems like premature optimization to favor speed over correctness by default at the language level. Obviously, making decimal the default instead of float would be fraught with backward compatibility problems and thus is not presently feasible, but at the least for now Python could make it easier to use decimals and their associated nice arithmetic by having a literal syntax for them and making them built-in. So what do people think of: 1. making decimal.Decimal a built-in type, named "decimal" (or "dec" if that's too long?) 2. adding a literal syntax for decimals; I'd naively suggest a 'd' suffix to the float literal syntax (which was suggested in the brief aforementioned thread) 3. (in Python 4.0/Python 4000) making decimal the default instead of float, with floats instead requiring a 'f' suffix Obviously #1 & #2 would be shooting for Python 3.1 or later. Cheers, Chris P.S. Yay for the long-awaited release of Python 3.0! Better than can be said for Perl 6. -- Follow the path of the Iguana... http://rebertia.com