[Python-Dev] PEP 0484 - the Numeric Tower

[Raymond Hettinger]

> On Oct 13, 2015, at 9:16 AM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> ## ----------------
>> ## Decimal has all of the methods specified by the Real abc, but it should
>> ## not be registered as a Real because decimals do not interoperate with
>> ## binary floats (i.e.  Decimal('3.14') + 2.71828 is undefined).  But,
>> ## abstract reals are expected to interoperate (i.e. R1 + R2 should be
>> ## expected to work if R1 and R2 are both Reals).
> 
> Why?

Q.  Why is Python the way it is?
A.   Because Guido said so ;-)

IIRC, the answer is that we were being conservative with possibly unintended operations between types with differing precision and with differing notions of what numbers could be exactly representable.

We could have (and still could) make the choice to always coerce to decimal (every float is exactly representable in decimal).  Further, any decimal float or binary float could be losslessly coerced to a Fraction, but that probably isn't what you really want most of the time.  I think people who work in decimal usually want to stay there and people who work with binary floating point want to stay there as well (invisible coercions being more likely to cause pain than relieve pain).


Raymond