On Saturday, March 8, 2014 2:16:26 AM UTC-6, Andrew Barnert wrote:
I think you're a little confused here.
repr() doesn't act like an eval(). It's sort of an _inverse_ of eval, for some types.[1] For example, the repr of Decimal('0.1') is the string "Decimal('0.1')", and eval("Decimal('0.1')") will give you Decimal('0.1').
You are correct, I was confused about the inverse relationship, for some types, because the http doc says: For many types, this function makes an attempt to return a string that would yield an object with the same value when passed to eval(), But, the system doc help() makes things more clear: repr(...) repr(object) -> string Return the canonical string representation of the object. For most object types, eval(repr(object)) == object. Thank you, your explanation of the caveats for repr() were helpful to me. marcus