Comparison with Ruby ?

[Johann Hibschman]

Moshe Zadka writes:

> Numbers are numbers: I shouldn't care about how to store numbers in 
> machine-level integers more then I should care how to reallocate lists.
> This PEP is a bit backwards incompatible, but in my not so humble opinion,
> I think it does have a good chance of being in Py3K.

I just read that; looks nice.  Inspired by Scheme?  Then again, it's
not suprising that I like it; at least someone's Python humor file
quotes me twice going off on the same issue.  I'll have to be more
circumspect this time.  :-)

In any case, as someone who does a lot of numerics, I've got to say
that folding this under "numbers are numbers" is unwholesome.  Inexact
numbers are not exact numbers.  That lets the number-crunchers use
their types happily.

Integers (fixnums) and rationals and bignums, on the other hand, are
"numbers" and there should be no walls between them.

--J

-- 
Johann Hibschman                           johann at physics.berkeley.edu