On Mar 20, 2010, at 9:40 PM, Greg Ewing wrote: > Mark Dickinson wrote: > >> Except that float is fixed-width (typically 53 bits of precision), >> while Decimal allows a user-specified, arbitrarily large, precision; > > Yes, but it still has *some* fixed limit at any given > moment, so the result of an operation on Decimals always > has the potential to produce an inexact result. It's > not like an int or Fraction where the result can expand > to whatever size is needed.
I'm thinking that I need to do more work on the Decimal documentation. There still seems to be a profound misunderstanding of its capabilities (i.e. that an Inexact flag can be set to preclude any inexact operations, that the precision can be automatically extended as needed during a calculation, or that many types of calculations can be done exactly especially if floor division is used). If rounded is needed, it can be controlled explicitly. Raymond _______________________________________________ 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
