Re: [Python-Dev] str with base

On Tue, 2006-01-17 at 15:08 +1100, Andrew Bennetts wrote:

My reaction having read this far was "huh?". It took some time (several seconds) before it occurred to me what you wanted str(5,2) to mean, and why it should give '101'.

If you'd proposed, say (5).as_binary() == '101', or "5".encode("base2"), I wouldn't have been as baffled. Or perhaps even str(5, base=2), but frankly the idea of the string type doing numeric base conversions seems weird to me, rather than symmetric.

I wouldn't mind seeing arbitrary base encoding of integers included somewhere, but as a method of str -- let alone the constructor! -- it feels quite wrong.

Hear, hear. I was similarly perplexed when I first read that!

-Barry