Bengt Richter wrote: > On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 08:18:25 -0500, Peter Hansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>> In Mythical Future Python I would like to be able to use any base in >>> integer literals, which would be better. Example random syntax: >>> >>> flags= 2x00011010101001 >>> umask= 8x664 >>> answer= 10x42 >>> addr= 16x0E800004 # 16x == 0x >>> gunk= 36x8H6Z9A0X >> >>I think I kinda like this idea. Allowing arbitrary values, >>however, would probably be pointless, as there are very >>few bases in common enough use that a language should make >>it easy to write literals in any of them. So I think "36x" >>is silly, and would suggest limiting this to 2, 8, 10, and >>16. At the very least, a range of 2-16 should be used. >>(It would be cute but pointless to allow 1x000000000. :-) >> > My concern is negative numbers when you are interested in the > bits of a typical twos-complement number. (BTW, please don't tell me > that's platform-specific hardware oriented stuff: Two's complement is > a fine abstraction for interpreting a bit vector, which is another > fine abstraction ;-) > > One way to do it consistently is to have a sign digit as the first > digit after the x, which is either 0 or base-1 -- e.g., +3 and -3 would be > > 2x011 2x101 > 8x03 8x75 > 16x03 16xfd > 10x03 10x97
Why not just -2x11? IMHO, Py2.4 does not produce negative values out of hex or oct literals any longer, so your proposal would be inconsistent. Reinhold -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
