re: %b format (no, really)
Prompted in part by the comment in Michael Hudson's python-dev summary about this discussion having died, I'd like to summarize:
1. Most people who commented felt that a base-2 format would be useful, if only for teaching and debugging. With regard to questions about byte order:
A. Integer values are printed as base-2 numbers, so byte order is irrelevant.
B. Floating-point numbers are printed as:
[sign] [mantissa] [exponent]
The mantissa and exponent are shown according to rule A.
Why bother with floats at all? We can't print floats as hex either. If I were doing any kind of float-representation fiddling, I'd probably want to print it in hex anyway (I can read hex). But as I say, that's not for the general public.
2. Inventing a format for converting to arbitrary bases is dubious hypergeneralization (to borrow a phrase).
Agreed.
3. Implementation should mirror octal and hexadecimal support, e.g. a 'bin()' function to go with 'oct()' and 'hex()'.
4. The desirability or otherwise of a "%b" format specifier has nothing to do with the relative merits of any early microprocessor :-).
If no-one has strong objections, I'll put together a PEP on this basis.
Go for it. Or just submit a patch to SF -- this seems almost too small for a PEP to me. :-) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
participants (2)
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barry@digicool.com
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Guido van Rossum