On 21 September 2017 at 02:53, Steven D'Aprano
On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 11:13:44AM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:
I think so, as consider this question: how do you write a script that accepts a user-supplied string (e.g. from a CSV file) and treats it as hex floating point if it has the 0x prefix, and decimal floating point otherwise?
float.fromhex(s) if s.startswith('0x') else float(s)
[...]
And if the float() builtin were to gain a "base" parameter, then it's only a short step from there to allow at least the "0x" prefix on literals, and potentially even "0b" and "0o" as well.
So I'm personally +0 on the idea
I agree with your arguments. I just wish I could think of a good reason to make it +1 instead of a luke-warm +0.
I'm also +0. I think +0 is pretty much the correct response - it's OK with me, but someone who actually needs or wants the feature will need to implement it. It's also worth remembering that there will be implementations other than CPython that will need changes, too - Jython, PyPy, possibly Cython, and many editors and IDEs. So setting the bar at "someone who wants this will have to step up and provide a patch" seems reasonable to me. Paul