[Python-3000] Octal (original) (raw)

Mattias Engdegård mattias at virtutech.se
Wed Mar 14 16:58:08 CET 2007

"Patrick Maupin" <pmaupin at gmail.com> writes:

That's a great idea all the way around. Another possible syntax would be 1101 at 2, 1234 at 8, etc. I don't think that could mean anything currently.

It's a terrible idea all the way around. Be reasonable: in modern code, only decimal, hex and binary constants are of general use at all. Anything else is very much special-purpose code.

I have heard users of languages that use a general number base notation (16#fce2# in Ada and the similar syntax in Erlang) complain about how this buys them nothing compared to the much nicer 0x... syntax of Python and C for the bases that people actually use.

I have frequently wanted binary constants when doing actual programming in Python - the 0b1101 syntax would certainly be handy. Perl allows it, but I hope that is not an argument against it - it would be even more useful in Python.

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