[Python-Dev] Decimal(unicode)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Thu Mar 27 03:06:04 CET 2008


Greg Ewing wrote:
> Nick Coghlan wrote:
>> Greg Ewing wrote:
>>
>>> I thought Decimal was going to be replaced by a C
>>> implementation soon anyway.
>> I believe that was found to be more trouble than it was worth.
> 
> That's very disappointing. Was there any discussion of
> the problems that killed it? I don't remember seeing
> any showstoppers being mentioned.

I believe the list of incompatibilities and kludges and the subsequent 
comments in the following file give the gist of the problems:
http://svn.python.org/projects/sandbox/trunk/decimal-c/_decimal.c

Basically, while it makes a lot of sense to move the *arithmetic* to C 
(as Mark mentioned in his other post), there's a lot of ancillary stuff 
related to flags and exceptions and context handling that is much easier 
to handle in Python.

Cheers,
Nick.


-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
---------------------------------------------------------------
             http://www.boredomandlaziness.org


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