On Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:18:43 pm Guido van Rossum wrote: > I've never heard of someone who had a use case for > denormalized fractions
Off-topic, but for what it's worth, I have one -- there's a mathematical operator called the mediant: mediant(a/b, c/d) = (a+c)/(b+d) It has a few uses, including Farey fractions. Clearly the result you get from normalized fractions will be different from denormalized (compare mediant(1/2, 3/4) with mediant(5/10, 3/4)). This leads to Simpson's Paradox, which is of importance in medical research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox Brief summary: consider two medical studies comparing two different treatments for an illness, treatment A and B. According to the first study, treatment A is better; according to the second study, treatment A is also better. But combining the results of the two studies into a single comparison paradoxically shows that treatment B is better! The mediant is fascinating (to maths geeks at least) and important, and you need denormalized fractions. -- Steven D'Aprano _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
