On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 09:39:05PM -0700, Neil Girdhar wrote: > Would there be any problem with changing: > > In [4]: Fraction(1, 1) ** Fraction(2, 3) > Out[4]: 1.0 > > In [5]: Fraction(-1, 1) ** Fraction(2, 3) > Out[5]: (-0.4999999999999998+0.8660254037844387j) > > In [6]: Fraction(0, 1) ** Fraction(2, 3) > Out[6]: 0.0 > > I'd like these to be Fraction(1), Fraction(1), and Fraction(0).
If anyone else has mentioned the backward-compatibility issue by now, I haven't see it. I believe that would make it a fairly big problem. I expect that there is code out in the wild which (for good or ill) now expects 1**Fraction(2, 3) to return 1.0, rather than Fraction(1), and similarly for the other examples. Changing that could break people's code. Even if we had consensus that this was a good idea, or at least consensus from the maths-folk who care about this sort of thing (I'd like to know what Uncle Timmy and Mark think of this idea), it would still probably need a "__future__" import to activate it, or a deprecation period. Or some other annoyance. Possibly the simpler approach would be to add a subclass that does what you want. UnitRootFraction or something. Then the only argument will be whether such a subclass ought to go into the fractions module, or your own personal toolkit :-) I must admit though, I'm a bit curious as to what you are doing that having 1**Fraction(2,3) return 1.0 is an annoyance, but having 27**Fraction(2,3) return 8.999999999999998 instead of Fraction(9) isn't. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
