[Python-Dev] Re: PEP239 (Rational Numbers) Reference Implementation and new issues

[Oren Tirosh]

On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 03:55:49PM +0200, Thomas Wouters wrote:
> I'd also say rational-literals are not that important. Looking at my own
> Python code, I very rarely need a floating-point literal to start with.
> Strings, plenty, dicts and lists fairly often, integers every now and then,
> but floating point numbers very rarely, and almost all of them are just
> '0.0' or an integer expressed as float to force float-division. Most of my
> float objects come from (library) functions that return them.

Having nice-looking literals is important even if they are not actually
typed in the source code too often.  The literal form is also the repr()
for all built-in numeric types so far. I don't think we should break that.

What would your like to see as the repr() of a rational number? The answer
to this will also determine what you type in your source.

Note that repr(n) is not necessarily str(n):

>>> repr(f)
'0.59999999999999998'
>>> str(f)
'0.6'

So we could have:

>>> repr(r)
'3/5r'    # or 'rat(3, 6)'
>>> str(r)
'3/5'

	Oren