Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> writes: > Actually, the real question is, is the unary - *really* so useful that > it merits existence or is it just something that was mindlessly copied > into programming languages from elementary school arithmetics?
The alternative, if you want to be able to specify negative numbers at all, is to put - in the literal syntax. So what's "x-1"? I suppose you could use some *different* symbol in the literal syntax for negative numbers. I had a calculator once that used a different symbol (looked like a small superscript minus sign) for it. But Python is limited to ASCII for basic syntax elements for good reasons. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
