[Python-Dev] Strategy for converting the decimal module to C

[Tim Peters]

[Raymond Hettinger]
> ...
> If the current approach gets in their way, the C implementers should feel free to
> make an alternate design choice.

I expect they will, eventually.  Converting this to C is a big job,
and at the NFS sprint we settled on an "incremental" strategy allowing
most of the module to remain written in Python, converting methods to
C one at a time.  Changing the user-visible API is a hard egg to
swallow, and it's unfortunate that the Python code used a dict to hold
"flags" to begin with.  The dict doesn't just record whether an
exception has occurred, it also counts how many times the exception
occurred.  It's possible that someone, somewhere, has latched on to
that as "a feature".