Why not FP for Money?

[Alex Martelli]

Carlos Ribeiro <carribeiro at gmail.com> wrote:
   ...
> notation were convenient enough. More often than not, people will
> continue to use floats, have precision problems, and complain at
> c.l.py. I could bet that the number of threads about rounding errors
> is not going to be lower over the next months even with Decimal in the
> standard library :-) (Let's hope I'm wrong!)

You're probably right, but it will be nice to be able to point the
querants to module decimal.  Backwards incompatible changes, such as
taking a literal of 1.1 to mean a decimal rather than a float, are not
in the cards until Python 3.0 time -- meanwhile we need to collect the
needed in-the-field experience to support the incompatible changes we'll
want, such as the meaning of such literals.


Alex