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

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Wed Feb 1 18:47:34 CET 2006

bokr at oz.net (Bengt Richter) wrote:

On Wed, 01 Feb 2006 12:33:36 +0000, "Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro" <gjc at inescporto.pt> wrote: [...] > Hmm.. I'm beginning to think 13r16 or 16r13 look too cryptic to the >casual observer; perhaps a suffix letter is more readable, since we >don't need arbitrary radix support anyway.

[snip discussion over radix and compliments]

I hope I'm not the only one who thinks that "simple is better than complex", at least when it comes to numeric constants. Certainly it would be convenient to express constants in a radix other than decimal, hexidecimal, or octal, but to me, it all looks like noise.

Peronally, I was on board for the removal of octal literals, if only because I find seeing a leading zero without something else (like the 'x' for hexidecimal) to be difficult, and because I've found little use for them in my work (decimals and hex are usually all I need).

Should it change for me? Of course not, but I think that adding different ways to spell integer values will tend to confuse new and seasoned python users. Some will like the flexibility that adding new options offers, but I believe such a change will be a net loss for the understandability of those pieces of code which use it.

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