[Pymoney-general] Re: Currency's distrib() method

[Jeff K. <jt...@ya...>]

Facundo Batista wrote:
> The basic idea is to distribute a Currency amount between different
> parts, and being sure that you're not losing information (well, money,
> ;).  But we saw three methods of doing it:
>     >>> Currency(1).distrib(3)
>     [Currency("0.33"), Currency("0.33"), Currency("0.34")]

This is an easily understood example of why the distrib() method will be
necessary for Currency objects. It hadn't really sunk in until Raymond
mentioned pymoney's missing '/' operator on python-dev.

Something like the 1-into-3 example should always be prominently mentioned
in the documentation, as well as the docstring for distrib(). It should
probably also appear in some sort of exception message when a user tries
to use division with a Currency object.

It would also be useful to show for comparison a correct and efficient
distrib() for Decimal objects. If the recommendation is to convert to
Decimal when doing averages and other risky/lossy math, then it would be
good to show the cannonical Decimal distrib() function in convenient
location in the pymoney docs.

A distrib() function should not be added to stdlib decimal, obviously.