Guido van Rossum wrote:
On 1/19/06, Fredrik Lundh fredrik@pythonware.com wrote:
Guido van Rossum wrote:
I think we ought to let this sit for a while and come back to it in a few week's time. Is 'base' really the right name? It could just as well be considered a conversion in the other direction.
the same applies to hex and oct, of course.
Right. And this is not a hypothetical issue either -- in Perl, hex and oct *do* work the other way I believe. More reasons to get rid of these in Python 3000. Perhaps we should also get rid of hex/oct lterals?
I'm not aware of anyone that would miss octal literals, but there are plenty of hardware weenies like me that would find "int("DEAD", 16)" less convenient than "0xDEAD". Python is a bit too heavyweight for a lot of embedded work, but its *great* for writing host-based test harnesses.
I quite like the suggestion of using 'math.base' rather than a builtin, but there are still issues to be figured out there: - the math module is currently a thin wrapper around C's "math.h". Do we really want to change that by adding more methods? - is 'base' the right name? - should we allow a "digits" argument, or just the radix argument?
Cheers, Nick.