[docs] [issue26256] Fast decimalisation and conversion to other bases

[Jurjen N.E. Bos]

Jurjen N.E. Bos added the comment:

OMG is decimal that fast?
Maybe I should change the issue then to "documentation missing": it nowhere says in the documentation that decimal has optimized multiprecision computations. It only says that precision "can be as large as needed for a given problem", but I never realized that that included millions of digits.
It computed to my complete surprise 2**2**29 to full precision (161 million decimal digits) in about a minute. That smells suspiciously like FFT style multiplication, which implies that it is way more sophisticated than integer multiplication!
I suggest that the documentation of the decimal module recommends using decimal for multiprecision computations, as long as you use the builtin version.

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assignee:  -> docs at python
components: +Documentation -Library (Lib)
nosy: +docs at python
versions: +Python 3.4 -Python 2.7

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue26256>
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