On 9/30/11 6:54 AM, rantingrick wrote: > a misplaced and rarely used functionality of the stdlib.
Have you tried putting "\.zfill\(" and selecting Python in google.com/codesearch? It seems to have quite a few users, among only openly available code. Considering there is a much larger body of code that isn't openly available, its not hard to extrapolate from the search. (Then again, the Python Community is made up of only people on this list! Everyone knows that.) Sure, you can use format strings, but that is a significantly more complicated thing to do. It may not be /common/, but is not at all unusual for one to have in a string a number that they want to line up numerically with zeros. You may not have had to do it a lot. But, golly, you are not a representative sample of the world. Your code, your projects, the things you have done, are not a representative sample of all the Python code, projects, and things people have done with Python out there. The "zfill" may not be a super wonderful function, used by many in most places. But its there, its simple, its clear what it does. Removing it means that anyone who wants to do what it did, now have to learn a fairly complex mini-language, even if perhaps that is the only time they will /ever/ need to use said language. That's a burden which is just, frankly, silly. Its nice that the format mini-language is powerful. But its nice that there are also simple, clear, direct primitives people can use to accomplish simple, fairly common needs. -- Stephen Hansen ... Also: Ixokai ... Mail: me+list/python (AT) ixokai (DOT) io ... Blog: http://meh.ixokai.io/
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