prePEP: Decimal data type

[Aahz]

In article <vqld259b45h572 at news.supernews.com>,
John Roth <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> wrote:
>
>The trouble is that most of the difficulty that's being discussed is
>not for casual users. It's for professional users that have to adhere
>to legal, regulatory and other requirements that have no inherent
>underlying order that makes them amenable to a nice, neat and trivially
>understandable solution.
>
>If coming up with something that is understandable to novices is a rock
>bottom requirement, then I most respectfully suggest that the rest of
>the discussion is a waste of time.

Well, I disagree with that.

>The part of my response which you didn't quote said something
>about my not being able to find an expression syntax that would
>handle these essentially arbitrary and capricious regulations. If
>you would suggest one, I'd be delighted.

Oh, I don't think there's a purely expression-based syntax that will
solve that problem.  But because it's easy enough (or should be -- I
still haven't looked at the most recent version of the code) to create
context objects and then use them to switch the active context between
operations, I think that expert programmers will have little difficulty
parameterizing their operations.  Using named contexts should make
things reasonably easy to read.

Or, as Tim pointed out, the current code allows one to call operations
directly on a context.  That's pretty close to what you were asking for
earlier.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"It is easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code."
--Bill Harlan