[lutusp]

You make some good points. I've been in this field for almost 40 years -- I can remember a time when having a dedicated floating-point processor was seen as an unnecessary gimmick, only available at extra cost. Much has changed, and I think what constitutes a normal set of mathematical functions is changing as well, for a number of reasons:

1. Better math training in school.

2. More kinds of applied math problems being routinely evaluated by Python and other languages.

3. More available memory and storage capacity.

All of which argue for larger math libraries with more functions and classes of functions.

> Presumably, most Python users don't need anything beyond what a financial calculator would provide, and anyone else should head to numpy.

I would normally agree, but the argument has been made in this thread that numpy can't be installed in some environments -- environments that easily support Python, but that don't accommodate numpy without great difficulty.