On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 10:22 AM, Alexander Schmolck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > It's amazing that after over half a century of computing we still can't denote > numbers with more than 4 digits readably in the vast majority of contexts. >
I agree. So did Forth's early designers. That is why Forth's number parser considers a word that starts with a number and has embedded punctuation to be a 32 bit integer, and simply ignores the punctuation. I haven't used Forth in years, but it seems a neat solution to the problem of decoding a long string of numbers: let the user put in whatever they want, the parser ignores it. I usually used a comma (with no surrounding whitespace of course), but it was your choice. You could also do this in whatever base you were working in, so you could punctuate a 32 bit hex number to correspond to the bit fields inside it. Of course not applicable to Python. -- Tom Harris <celephicus(AT)gmail(DOT)com> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
