Larry Wall wrote:
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 12:11:01PM -0800, Darren Duncan wrote:
: Carl Mäsak wrote:
: >Darren (>):
: >>While I haven't seen any prior art on this, I'm thinking that it would be
: >>nice for a sense of completeness or parity to have an 0a syntax specific to
: >>base-4 that complements the 4 that we have now for bases 2,8,16,10.
: >
: >You're joking, right?
:
: No, its a serious idea, just not so conventional. -- Darren Duncan
The lack of base 4 numbers in Real Life seems to me to justify the
convention. Do you have a use case?
Actually, the primary case I was thinking of was with blobs.
S02 currently says:
* Blob literals look similar to integer literals with radix markers, but use
curlies instead of angles:
:2{0010_1110_1000_10} a blob1, base 2, 1 bit per column
:4{} a blob2, 2 bits per column
:8{5235 0437 6} a blob3, 3 bits per column
:16{A705E} a blob4, 4 bits per column
Whitespace and underscores are allowed but ignored.
Now, granted, all of the above examples use :N format, but if 0a formats
actually are supported for blobs as I would expect given the above description,
like this:
0b{0010_1110_1000_10} a blob1, base 2, 1 bit per column
0o{5235 0437 6} a blob3, 3 bits per column
0x{A705E} a blob4, 4 bits per column
... then for blobs in particular, I had thought it would be appropriate to have
a base-4 version.
But if there is no agreement, then so be it, I will retract my proposal.
-- Darren Duncan
