On Aug 23, 7:45 pm, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > greg <g...@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz> writes: > > J. Cliff Dyer wrote: > > > > What happens if you use a literal like 0x10f 304? > > > To me the obvious thing to do is concatenate them textually and then > > treat the whole thing as a single numeric literal. Anything else > > wouldn't be sane, IMO. > > Yet, as was pointed out, that behaviour would be inconsistent with the > concatenation of string literals:: > > >>> "abc" r'def' u"ghi" 'jkl' > u'abcdefghijkl'
Well my take on it is that this would not be the same as string concatenation, the series of digits would be parsed as a single token with spaces automatically removed. That does make a difference to the users (it's not just under the covers). For instance, string concatenation works across lines: "abc" "def" but if the numbers were parsed as a single token it wouldn't necessarily be allowed, and would be unwise, so this is out: 100 200 You might want to also enforce rules such as only a single space can separate digits, no tabs, not multiple spaces, so this 100 200 would also be right out. You might even want to enforce that spaces be at regular intervals. I don't think it would matter too much that digit separation can superficially resemble string concatenation if you don't break the strings across lines, it's not too difficult to explain what the difference is, and there's really not much chance anyone would be confused by their meanings. Having said all that, I would favor _ as a digit separator in Python any day of the week, and I don't think it's all that important to have one at all. HOWEVER, I once proposed that if I were designing a new language I'd consider allowing spaces in identifiers. (That didn't stop people from arguing why it would be confusing in Python, but never mind that.) If spaces were allowed in identifiers, then I'd be also in favor of spaces in numeric literals. > So, different representations of literals are parsed as separate > literals, then concatenated. To have the behaviour you describe, the > case needs to be made separately that digit concatenation should not be > consistent with the established string literal parsing behaviour. Well, one doesn't really *need* to make that case, they just might not care about consistency. But if they did I think Erik's case is a good one: very little chance of confusion because there's really only one reasonable interpretation. The point of consistency is to help understand things by analogy, but if analogy doesn't help understanding--and it wouldn't in this case--there's no point. Carl Banks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
