[Python-Dev] Decimal(unicode)

[Terry Reedy]

"Mark Dickinson" <dickinsm at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:5c6f2a5d0803250853g4814eac6n25b07326f2e7805d at mail.gmail.com...
| On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> 
wrote:
|
| > The isinstance(value, str) check in Py3k is too restrictive - it needs
| > to accept bytes instances as well.
| >
|
| Hmm. There's not a lot of consistency here:
|
| >>> int(b'1')
| 1
| >>> float(b'1')
| 1.0
| >>> complex(b'1')
| Traceback (most recent call last):
|  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
| TypeError: complex() argument must be a string or a number
| >>> from fractions import Fraction
| >>> Fraction(b'1')
| Traceback (most recent call last):
|  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
|  File "/Users/dickinsm/python_source/py3k/Lib/fractions.py", line 98, in
| __new__
|    numerator = numerator.__index__()
| AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute '__index__'
|
| So int and float accepts bytes, while complex, Decimal and Fraction do
| not...

The purpose of type constructors is to construct instances from reasonable 
inputs.  I think all number constructors should accept bytes and so the 
latter three should be changed.

tjr