[Python-ideas] real numbers with SI scale factors

[Nick Coghlan]

On 29 August 2016 at 22:55, Mark Lawrence via Python-ideas
<python-ideas at python.org> wrote:
> As iPython is a core part of scipy, which I linked above, why would the
> developers want to incorporate this suggestion?  I'd have also thought that
> if this idea was to be "wildly popular" it would have been done years ago.

While "If this was a good idea, it would have been done years ago" is
a useful rule of thumb, it's also useful to look for ways to test that
heuristic to see if there were actually just other incidental barriers
in the way of broader adoption. That's particularly so for cases like
this one, where a common practice in a handful of domains has failed
to make the leap into the broader computing context of general purpose
programming.

One of the nice things about IPython for this kind of experimentation
is that it's *significantly* more pluggable than the default
interpreter (where you can do some interesting things with import
hooks, but it's hard to change the default REPL). That means it's
easier for people to try out ideas as code pre-processors, rather than
as full Python implementations (in this case, something that
translated SI unit suffixes into runtime scaling factors)

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia