[Python-Dev] Base-n integer formatting (original) (raw)

Yuri Vilmanis vilmanis at internode.on.net
Wed Sep 10 23:09:29 EDT 2003

I have three feature requests for you: no. 1 is quite fundamental, no. 2 would be a 'nice' useful feature and no. 3 is a bit more esoteric, but very useful in certain applications

  1. print formatting for integers is currently only available for octal, hex, and decimal. This seems rather odd, as string to integer conversion is available for bases 2 through 36. End result: when I want to do things in base 6 (rare, but it has happened twice) or much more commonly in binary, I can read the numbers in, but cannot print the results - ie quite useless.

  2. Input and output formatting for unary (which is commonly referred to as base 1, yes, I know it's not 'really' base 1 by the general deinition of base, but "base 1" is the convention) would also be good, as would roman numeral support, especially in word-processing applications or IO from any formatted document with roman page/section numbers

  3. negative bases: I have needed this more times than I think some people would care to imagine. These representations have several very useful properties such as implementation-independent signdness (hence arbirtrary word length), and some more interesting properties I won't expand on here.

Context: I find python very handy not only as a programming/scripting language but also as a scratchpad for various number theory investigations. Unfortunately the output formatting leaves all but the most basic investigations out in the cold, and lack of negative base input/output makes it harder to use python to look for certain patterns in result sets, not to mention getting the data in...

Thanks, Yuri

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