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Comment by heresy | Hacker News Reader

I'm aware of the performance hit, I just like the approach of a BigDecimal literal instead of having to write that boilerplate.

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> I just like the approach of a BigDecimal literal instead of having to write that boilerplate.

Ah yes. Well not all languages require a bunch of boilerplate either. In Python for instance, there is a type decimal.Decimal which you can just alias to `d` and write:

    val = d('0.1')

I do wish there were a syntax for Decimal literals, e.g. 0.1D (analogous to 100L as long, etc.). Maybe I'll make it my weekend project even if I don't really expect it to be accepted into CPython proper.

I'm pretty sure the L syntax has gone away in Python3, with numbers being auto-promoted to Long if they're going to overflow. I'm a bit hazy about this, but I think I talked to the maintainer over lunch at PyCon two years ago.

There's actually no externally-visible long type at all in Python 3, it's all done transparently now. That said, I'm not using Python 3. The promoting behavior you speak of is how Python 2 works.

Indeed it has, integers and longs have been unified as a single `int` type, so the external marker is gone as well.

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