While I think some variation of: from __optional__ import decimal_literal
Might be reasonable, I'd probably rather see something like: X = 1.1D However: (thank you Chris and Stephen) -- Decimal is NOT a panacea, nor any more "accurate" than binary floating point. It is still floating point, it is still imprecise, it still can't represent all rational numbers, even within a range. The ONLY advantage is that it gives people the warm and fuzzies because they are used to being able to represent 1/10 exactly, while not representing 1/3 exactly. But 1/10 is only special BECAUSE of Decimal representation itself. I actually think that the Decimal docs over-sell its usefulness. For instance, it really isn't more suitable for money than binary floating point if you round your outputs. Decimal does provide variable precision, which does help. With a 64 bit float, you lose cent precision around a trillion dollars. But that's a precision issue, not a binary vs Decimal issue. And a float128 would work fine for more money than I'll ever have to deal with! If you really want to do money right, you should use a money type that is exact and follows the appropriate accounting rules for rounding. Probably fixed point. (There are a couple money packages on pypi -- no idea if they are any good) In short: I'm wary of the idea that most people would be better off with Decimal. It's really a special purpose type, and I think it's better if the issues with floating point precision make themselves obvious sooner than later. -CHB Sorry for the top-post -- I hate this phone email client.... Sent from my iPhone > On Jan 12, 2017, at 7:49 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On 12 January 2017 at 15:34, Victor Stinner <victor.stin...@gmail.com> wrote: >> 2017-01-12 13:13 GMT+01:00 Stephan Houben <stephan...@gmail.com>: >>> Something like: >>> from __syntax__ import decimal_literal >> >> IMHO you can already implement that with a third party library, see for >> example: >> https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy >> >> It also reminds me my PEP 511 which would open the gate for any kind >> of Python preprocessor :-) >> https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0511/ > > PEP 302 (import hooks) pretty much did that years ago :-) Just write > your own processor to translate a new filetype into bytecode, and > register it as an import hook. There was a web framework that did that > for templates not long after PEP 302 got implemented (can't recall the > name any more). > > Paul > _______________________________________________ > Python-ideas mailing list > Python-ideas@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas > Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
