proposed language change to int/int==float (was: PEP0238 lament)

[Aahz Maruch]

In article <slrn9m3q54.1c5.Gareth.McCaughan at g.local>,
Gareth McCaughan <Gareth.McCaughan at pobox.com> wrote:
>Guido van Rossum wrote:
>>[Tim Hochberg:]
>>>
>>> Actually, I do dislike this.  Much as I find floats generally useless, I 
>>> think that 0.666667 should return a float, and that if I want to write a 
>>> rational literal I should be able to write it as 2/3.
>> 
>> I think you're right.  An early version of ABC worked like this, and
>> at the time I though "hmm, but why shouldn't 0.98 be an exact number;
>> it could be intended as a price or something like that", and I
>> convinced the team to change it.  But in practice it was more often
>> annoying.  Now maybe that was because we (the biggest users) were CS
>> and math folks, and we tended to tackle typical math and CS problems
>> -- but my gut is to vote against this aspect of the PEP.
>
>I am a fan of rationals, but I strongly agree. Turning 0.98
>into 49/50 is likely to cause much more confusion than it
>saves.

If I ever get finished with Decimal.py, we'll likely make such numbers
into arbitrary-precision decimal numbers instead of binary floating
point.

[I keep talking about it in public to provide myself with one more
motivation to finish.  ;-)]
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