On 5/29/07, Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
My expectation before reading the delta was that negative counts
would do a reversal:
"123" x -1 = "321"
('a', 'b', 'c') xx -3 = ('c', 'b', 'a', 'c', 'b', 'a', 'c', 'b', 'a');
I don't know why I think that makes sense, but it was honestly my
first thought. Does it make sense to anyone else? Is there a
compelling reason I'm missing for having negative values behave as if
they were zero rather than adding some other potentially useful
functionality?
snip
In Perl 5 I commonly say things like
sub zeropad (
my ($len, $s) = @_;
my $slen = length $s;
carp "the string $s is longer than the specified length $len" if
$slen > $len;
return = 0 x ($len - length($str)) . $str;
);
Which is roughly equivalent to doing a sprintf with the format "%0${len}d".
