On Thu, 7 Apr 2022 at 16:03, Greg Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: > > On 7/04/22 9:53 am, Chris Angelico wrote: > > how else would you do variable-precision in the standard library? > > Maybe the mistake was in thinking that we need variable > precision at all. > > If the goal of Decimal was to provide arithmetic that > "works like your calculator", well, most calculators have > a fixed precision of 10 or so digits, which seems to be > fine for most things. > > So why *do* we have variable precision in Decimal? >
Because it's incredibly useful to do highly precise calculations, but not very helpful to make them arbitrarily expensive, so it's good to be able to choose the tradeoff between computational cost and numeric accuracy. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/IU4MVEBFL22MTJFRUZEWSSGIQ6MBURMT/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
