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prePEP: Decimal data type

Alex Martelli aleax at aleax.it
Sat Nov 1 14:19:39 EST 2003 
John Roth wrote:
   ...
> I decided to snip the prior piece rather than argue about your
> misconception of what I intended. This would have been obvious
> if you had left the context of my comment in, rather than starting
> it out with my response to something invisible to the reader.

I prefer to trim posts from such generally irrelevant history,
but if you think "This would have been obvious" here is ALL you
had to say in your first post in response to the point, which
you quoted in full, about what operators should apply to decimals:

"""
> 12. To support the basic aritmetic (``+, -, *, /, //, **, %, divmod``) and
>     comparison (``==, !=, <, >, <=, >=, cmp``) operators in the following
>     cases:
>
>        - Decimal op Decimal
>        - Decimal op otherType
>        - otherType op Decimal
>        - Decimal op= Decimal
>        - Decimal op= otherType
>
>     Check `Items In Discussion`_ to see what types could OtherType be, and
>     what happens in each case.



> 13. To support unary operators (``-, +, abs``).

OK.
"""

Now try to argue _with a straight face_ that, quoting this part entirely, it
"would have been obvious" that you wanted to abrogate the applicability of
normal division operators to decimals, and therefore did not need as your
cherished "unbounded precision decimal" a full rational number in some
form.  Pah.

Assuming that's what you intended in that post, I think you made a huge
mistake in NOT saying so, rather just placing a meek "OK" there, and are
now trying to imply that instead of your huge mistake there were some
"misconception" (or as you said earlier, even LESS defensibly!,
"preconceptions" [!!!]) on MY part.  In my view of the world, it's all
right to make a mistake (we're humans), but it's NOT ok to try to attack
others rather than admitting and apologizing for one's mistake.


Alex
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