Hi, I think http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3101/ is too liberal with the choice of fill characters for numerical values. As far as I can see, this is quite legal: Python 2.7a0 (trunk:76132M, Nov 6 2009, 15:20:35) [GCC 4.1.3 20080623 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.1.2-23ubuntu3)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
from decimal import * format(Decimal(4), "9<10") '4999999999' format(Decimal(4), "9>10") '9999999994' format(Decimal(4), "->2") '-4'
I propose to disallow digits and '+-' fill characters for numerical values, except for the combination '0, left-padding'. Actually, I'd prefer to allow only whitespace and '0, left-padding'. See also: http://bugs.python.org/issue6871 http://bugs.python.org/issue6902 Stefan Krah