[Python-Dev] PEP 515: Underscores in Numeric Literals (original) (raw)

Andrew Barnert abarnert at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 11 23:22:51 EST 2016

On Thursday, February 11, 2016 8:10 PM, Glenn Linderman <v+python at g.nevcal.com> wrote:

On 2/11/2016 7:56 PM, David Mertz wrote:

Great PEP overall. We definitely don't want the restriction to grouping numbers only in threes. South Asian crore use grouping in twos. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crore

Interesting... 3 digits in the least significant group, and then by twos. Wouldn't have predicted that one! Never bumped into that notation before!

The first time I used underscore separators in any language, it was a test script for a server that wanted social security numbers as integers instead of strings, like 123_45_6789.[^1]

Which is why I suggested the style guideline should just say "meaningful grouping of digits", rather than try to predict what counts as "meaningful" for every program.

[^1] Of course in Python, it's usually trivial to stick a shim in between the database and the model thingy so I could just pass in "123-45-6789", so I don't expect to ever need this specific example.

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