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

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Wed Feb 1 20:51:41 CET 2006

On Wed, 2006-02-01 at 11:07 -0800, Josiah Carlson wrote:

In my experience, I've rarely had the opportunity (or misfortune?) to deal with negative constants, whose exact bit representation I needed to get "just right". For my uses, I find that specifying "-0x..." or "-..." to be sufficient.

I can't remember a time when signed hex, oct, or binary representation wasn't a major inconvenience, let alone something desirable. Don't get me started about hex(id(object()))! I typically use hex for addresses and bit fields, binary for bit flags and other bit twiddling, and oct for OS/file system interfaces. In none of those cases do you actually need or want signed values. IME.

-Barry

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