On Sat, Mar 12, 2016 at 10:08 PM, BartC <b...@freeuk.com> wrote:
>>> You're not mistaken. There are no "character constants" in Python.
>>> (Note that the definition would be Unicode codepoints, rather than
>>> ASCII values.) I don't often miss them, though.
>
>> Yes, a complete non-issue.
>
>
> Really? The issue as I see it is this:
>
> Writing: a=65 generates this byte-code for the right-hand-side:
>
> LOAD_CONST 1 (65) An integer
>
> But writing instead: a=ord('A') generates this:
>
> LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (ord)
> LOAD_CONST 1 ('A') A string
> CALL_FUNCTION 1
I think the "non-issue" here is the difference between ASCII and
Unicode. Either way, there's no way to say "the integer with the
codepoint of this character" as a literal. But that's actually not
even all that necessary, because subscripting a text string yields
one-character strings - you almost never need the ordinals.
Subscripting a byte string in Py3 yields integers, so you might need
ordinals for ASCII byte values. But you can get them the same way:
>>> dis.dis(lambda: b"a"[0])
1 0 LOAD_CONST 3 (97)
3 RETURN_VALUE
>>> dis.dis(lambda: u"a"[0])
1 0 LOAD_CONST 3 ('a')
3 RETURN_VALUE
Whichever one you need, you can get as a compile-time constant.
ChrisA
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