A possible change to decimal.Decimal?

[Ethan Furman]

Jeff Beardsley wrote:
> HISTORY:  
> 
> In using python 2.7.2 for awhile on a web project (apache/wsgi web.py), I discovered a problem in using decimal.Decimal.  A short search revealed that many other people have been having the problem as well, in their own apache/wsgi implementations (django, mostly), but I found no real solutions among the posts I read.  So I did some experimentation of my own.
> 
> The following code will break unexpectedly on standard python2.7 (and earlier) because of the way that isinstance fails after reload() (which is called by both of the above web frameworks).
> 
> This is the error: TypeError("Cannot convert %r to Decimal" % value)
> 
> THE TEST CODE
> 
> import decimal
> from decimal import Decimal
> 
> #this works
> Decimal(Decimal())
> 
> reload(decimal)
> 
> #this fails before patching, but works fine afterwards
> Decimal(Decimal())
> 

Patching decimal.py to make it work with reload() is probably not going 
to happen.

What you should be doing is:

   import decimal
   from decimal import Decimal

   reload(decimal)
   Decimal = decimal.Decimal   # (rebind 'Decimal' to the reloaded code)

~Ethan~