[Python-Dev] Octal literals (original) (raw)

Bengt Richter bokr at oz.net
Fri Feb 3 01:27:19 CET 2006

On Fri, 3 Feb 2006 10:16:17 +1100, "Delaney, Timothy (Tim)" <tdelaney at avaya.com> wrote:

Andrew Koenig wrote:

I definately agree with the 0c664 octal literal. Seems rather more intuitive. I still prefer 8r664. The more I look at this, the worse it gets. Something beginning with zero (like 0xFF, 0c664) immediately stands out as "unusual". Something beginning with any other digit doesn't. This just looks like noise to me. I found the suffix version even worse, but they're blown out of the water anyway by the fact that FFr16 is a valid identifier. Are you sure you aren't just used to the x in 0xff? I.e., if the leading 0 were just an alias for 16, we could use 8x664 instead of 8r664.

BTW Ada uses radix prefix, but with # separating the prefix, so we can't use that. How about apostrophe as separator?

 8'664   # or the suffix version could work also, although you'd have to back out of some names:
   664'8
   bee'16

Regards, Bengt Richter

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list