[Python-Dev] Decimal conversion to string (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Apr 15 09:55:56 EDT 2004

But who cares about the gory details of the internals? The most important thing about a repr() is to unambiguously indicate the object's type; the next is to show something about its value, as far as reasonably possible. What's actually inside the object doesn't matter much.

I didn't see the start of this, but the guidelines for repr() are and have always been this: if at all possible it should be an expression that, when fed to eval(), (assuming the right imports are in scope), returns an object with the same type and value. In most cases, this means it should resemble a call to the constructor with suitable arguments. If that isn't possible, a form surrounded with <...> should be used, and it should at least show the object's type and some stuff that can be used to distinguish different instances (either the address or some representative property of the instance).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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