For the last 2+ years I've been occasionally arguing for the introduction of a basenumber (and ideally a baseinteger, but that, to me, is a slightly lesser issue) analogous to basestring. Google search fo [basenumber site:python.org] for several messages on the subject, by me and others; it will also find the recent thread about more general abstract baseclasses, which seems to have bogged down on such issues as whether sets are mappings.
Now, today, I have _again_ been bit by the lack of basenumber (by a bug of mine, fixed by adding decimal.Decimal to a long tuple of classes to be passed to an isinstance call -- I hadn't run that particular numeric code of mine since the time of Python 2.3, apparently), so I'm back to pining for it. The previous discussion was short but pretty exhaustive, so I'd ask further discussants to refer back to it, rather than repeating it; no blocking issue appears to have emerged at that time, plenty of use cases were pointed out, etc. Can we PLEASE have basenumber (and maybe baseinteger, so sequences can typecheck against that for their indices -- that's the key usecase of baseinteger) rather than have them "hijacked" by wider consideration of basesequence, basemapping, and so on...? Pretty please....? Let's be pragmatic: basenumber isn't at all complicated nor controversial, baseinteger hardly at all, so let's accept them while pondering on other potential base* classes for as long as it takes for the dust to settle.... I'll be happy to draft a PEP if needed (and just as happy to eventually provide an implementation patch if the PEP's accepted), but wanted to doublecheck on the general issue first! Alex _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
