> Just to clarify, no decision has yet been made on *whether*
> the cdecimal work should be integrated into py3k;
> we'll consult python-dev on this once we've got a working branch
> and performance information.

So, what is the status today?

_decimal looks to be huge. Does Python really need yet another multiprecision library? There is already gmpy and bigfloat, based on the heavily optimized GMP library, for example. Is it a license issue? Can't we reuse GMP/MPFR to offer a Decimal API?

_decimal should maybe first be distributed as a third party library until it is really well tested and its API is really stable, until we can decide to integrate it. The patch adds __setattr__ to the Decimal class.