On approximately 2/25/2010 8:51 PM, came the following characters from
the keyboard of Meador Inge:
Hi All,
Recently some discussion began in the issue 3132 thread
(http://bugs.python.org/issue3132) regarding
implementation of the new struct string syntax for PEP 3118. Mark
Dickinson
suggested that I bring the discussion on over to Python Dev. Below is
a summary
of the questions\comments from the thread.
Unpacking a long-double
===================
1. Should this return a Decimal object or a ctypes 'long double'?
2. Using ctypes 'long double' is easier to implement, but precision is
lost when needing to do arithmetic, since the value for cytpes
'long double'
is converted to a Python float.
3. Using Decimal keeps the desired precision, but the implementation
would
be non-trivial and architecture specific (unless we just picked a
fixed number of bytes regardless of the architecture).
4. What representation should be used for standard size and alignment?
IEEE 754 extended double precision?
Because of 2 (lossy, dependency), and 3 (non-trivial, architecture
specific), neither choice in 1 seems appropriate.
Because of the nature of floats, because the need for manipulation may
vary between applications, and because the required precision may vary
between applications, I would recommend adding a
"CLongDoubleStructWrapper" class (a better name would be welcome), which
would copy the architecture-specific byte-stream and preserve it. If
converted back to a struct, it would be lossless. If manipulation is
required, the class could have converters to Python float (lossy), and
Decimal of user-specifiable precision (punt the precision question to
the application developer, who should know the needs of the application,
and the expected platforms).
It might be reasonable to handle double and float similarly, at least as
an option. On the other hand, if there can be options, perhaps they
could be given when supplying the struct string syntax.... except the
application may only wish to manipulate a few of the long double values,
and converting the others would be wasteful.
--
Glenn -- http://nevcal.com/
===========================
A protocol is complete when there is nothing left to remove.
-- Stuart Cheshire, Apple Computer, regarding Zero Configuration Networking
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