PEP 791: imath --- module for integer-specific mathematics functions

[skirpichev (Sergey B Kirpichev)]

@pitrou

Well, it’s not really harder.

Concrete suggestions are welcome.

@pitrou

Just change the docs to point that the module provides mathematical functions

Which mathematical functions? The cmath or statistics modules have them a lot!

@guido

In comparison, the cmath module is separate for a very different reason – it provides some of the same functions but implemented for complex numbers (we chose to do it this way rather than just returning a complex from e.g. math.sqrt(-1) since users of math were used to getting an error for that).

As a bit of off-topic, did you consider to have some global flag(s) to control this? E.g. gmpy2 or mpmath have a context notion. In gmpy2, where the CPython’s counterpart have ValueError for domain error — you can get either nan/inf (per C standard), or an exception, or a complex result:

>>> import gmpy2
>>> gmpy2.sqrt(-1)
mpfr('nan')
>>> gmpy2.get_context().trap_invalid=True
>>> gmpy2.sqrt(-1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<python-input-4>", line 1, in <module>
    gmpy2.sqrt(-1)
    ~~~~~~~~~~^^^^
gmpy2.InvalidOperationError: invalid operation
>>> gmpy2.get_context().allow_complex = True
>>> gmpy2.sqrt(-1)
mpc('0.0+1.0j')

I can’t add much more to Tim’s and Serhyi’s comments. My 2c:

@guido

And keeping the aliases in math forever is even less ideal.

IIUIC, the “soft deprecation” doesn’t mean we will have to keep them forever. Eventually, we can deprecate these aliases. So, I doubt that backward compatibility or maintenance burden to keep aliases are good arguments against.

How about suggested by Steve submodule, say math.ntheory? The math module holds “catch-all” role for math, but integer-specific functions will have own namespace?