[Python-Dev] Google Summer of Code proposal: improvement of long int and adding new types/modules.

[Mateusz Rukowicz]

Guido van Rossum wrote:

>(Aside: you probably mean physicist, someone who practices physics. A
>physician is a doctor; don't ask me why. :-)
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;) I'll remember ;)

>>interpreted languages are particularly good for physics simulations, in
>>which small error would grow so much, that results are useless.
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>We already have decimal floating point which can be configured to use
>however many digits of precision you want. Would this be sufficient?
>If you want more performance, perhaps you could tackle the very useful
>project of translating decimal.py into C?
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Yes, it seems like better idea - already written software would benefit 
that transparently. I think I could develop 'margin' ideas later.

>I'm not sure I see the value of rational numbers implemeted in C;
>they're easy to write in Python and all the time goes into division of
>two ints which is already implemented in C.
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Well, quite true ;P

>Have you looked at the existing wrappers around OpenSSL, such as
>pyopenssl and m2crypto? ISTM that these provide most of the needed
>algorithms, already coded in open source C.
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Well, you already convinced me to not do that right now, but I still 
think python would benefit that, and it would be done later on, but this 
discussion may be moved in time.

>>I understand that most of these improvements have quite limited
>>audience, but I still think python should be friendly to them ;)
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>Sure. The question is, if there are more student applications than
>Google wants to fund, which projects will be selected? I would
>personally vote for the projects that potentially help out the largest
>number of Python users.
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So I think the most valuable of my ideas would be improving long int + 
coding decimal in C. Anyway, I think it would be possible to add other 
ideas later.