While i find the binary incomparability with with decimals somewhat annoying.
In the bigger picture what i fell we are generally missing in most programing languages is an EASY way to store and handle fractions.
In the bigger picture what i fell we are generally missing in most programing languages is an EASY way to store and handle fractions.
I'm squeamish about that. I fear that a lot of new programmers would overuse a fraction type if it were built in, and this can quickly lead to really poor performance.
In most cases, floating point works just fine. Reducing fractions is slow, so you really only want to use them when perfect precision is absolutely necessary.
What I see happening is someone new to programming hits a point where they need a fractional number type. They look in the documentation and they see "integer, floating point, fraction" and they say "Aha! Fraction! I know what those are."
(10/3)x(9/4) == 7.5
but due to the fact that computers store the value instead of the fraction it would come out as something like 7.4999999999 cause instead of doing (10x9)/(3x4) it would do 3.3333333333333 x 2.25
>>> from decimal import Decimal as D >>> D("10")/D("3") * D("9")/D("4") Decimal('7.50000000000000000000000000')