On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Mark Adam dreamingforward@gmail.com wrote:

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 8:03 PM, Steven D'Aprano steve@pearwood.info wrote:

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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".

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 :)

Hmm, well, if it's only that much slower, then we should implement Rationals and get rid of the issue altogether.

Now that I think of it, this issue has a strange whiff of the argument wherefrom came the "from __future__" directive and the split that happened between the vpython folks who needed the direct support of float division (rendering 3-d graphics for an interpreted environment) and the regular python crowd. Anyone else remember that?

mark