* For most users, this will just be noise (even the existing float method is rarely used).   It is unimportant enough that Python existed without it for a very long time and it is unimportant enough that it didn't arise during the lengthy process of creating the decimal module.  

* The numeric tower doesn't require that we take new methods and push them to every type whether or not it makes sense.  Most of the ABCs have only a subset of the methods in the concrete types.

* There are already simple workarounds using a try/except or a conditional expression.

-1 I really don't want more clutter added to all the numeric classes.  (Clutter being something rarely needed, easily implemented in other ways, something that looks weird or confusing in classes like int or Fraction, something that we have done without to 26 years, something not covered by the decimal spec, and something that isn't part of the floats API for either Java* or Smalltalk)

* http://www.tutorialspoint.com/java/lang/java_lang_float.htm