On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:40:24 -0500, Derek Martin wrote: > On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 05:03:28PM +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:21:46 -0500, Derek Martin wrote: >> > since the old syntax is prevalent both within and without the Python >> > community, making the change is, was, and always will be a bad idea. >> >> Octal syntax isn't prevalent *at all*, except in a small number of >> niche areas. > > Steven, don't be obtuse. Where octal is used in programming, the > leading zero is prevalent.
Now who is being obtuse? If you take *any* feature at all, no matter how rare, you can say "Where it is used, it is prevalent". Among people who program in Whitespace, all three of them, the use of spaces and tabs as significant programming tokens is prevalent. This whole argument is over whether or not a "feature" desired by a tiny proportion of the programming community -- the intersection of those who use octal frequently enough that using an extra 'o' is a hardship, and those who use C-based languages -- should hold *everyone else* hostage to their badly thought out notation. [...] > Why is it so hard for you to accept that intelligent people can disagree > with you, and that what's right for you might be bad for others? I can accept that intelligent people can disagree with me. I even sympathise with you, that you're one of the minority who don't find octal archaic and unnecessary, and you'll need to learn a new syntax for octal literals in Python 3.x. But your argument is fundamentally "but we've always done it this way, and other languages do it, so why should we change?". We should change because the desire to prevent silent errors caused by (e.g.) 012 being interpreted as 10, and the desire to be consistent with both mathematical notation and floating point syntax outweighs the need to be backward compatible. This change was not a spur of the moment thing, it went through the entire PEP process with due concern for backward compatibility, which Python does *not* change without good reason. You lost, get over it. I'm sorry that you personally find this change a hardship, but HTFU. If and when you move to Python 3.x, you'll get used to it. If you can get used to putting braces around code blocks in C and braces around dicts in Python, you're more than capable of getting used to writing 012 in C and 0o12 in Python. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
