Against PEP 240

[Tim Peters]

[Terry Reedy]
> ...
> If more of our distant ancestors had excluded their thumbs when
> counting, base 8 would have won out over base 10, and we would not
> have the problem leading to this discussion.

Ditto if more HW designers hadn't had their thumbs up their asses <wink --
but direct HW support for decimal arithmetic isn't impossible,
unprecedented, or even notably difficult or expensive>.

> ...
> I an increasingly sympathetic to the desire of others that
> decimal literals actually mean what they appear to, and to avoid
> other types of surprises.  I strongly suspect that a decimal
> rather than rational representation and arithmetic is the better
> alternative to binary floating point.

Besides the space and time surprises that come up with rationals, they're
not closed outside + - * /.  Throw in a sqrt or transcendental function, and
you're back to f.p. of some flavor.  Decimal f.p. extends nicely; rationals
don't.

> ...
> I wonder why we do not have (widespread, standardized) decimal
> FPUs as well as binary FPUs, which would push to extra overhead
> to the lowest level possible and give a pan-language solution.