[Python-ideas] Python3.3 Decimal Library Released

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Mar 3 23:54:08 CET 2014


Mark H. Harris wrote:
> One big issue that is going to confront everyone sooner than later is
> cryptography. Fast bignum support, fast factoring, and fast transcendentals
> are going to become more important

I don't see any reason that these have to be done in
decimal, though. All the bignum arithmetic used in
cryptography is integer, which is exact in any base.
Also, the user never sees the resulting numbers as
numbers. So the primary requirement is speed, which
argues for binary rather than decimal, at least on
current hardware.

-- 
Greg


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