It should *definitely* *not* be the str() constructor, which is already overloaded. Remember str() takes arguments of *any* type. Overloading variants on the conversion to string via arguments to str() doesn't scale. On 10/31/07, Steven Bethard wrote:

On 10/31/07, Christian Heimes wrote:

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Python's int type has an optional argument base which allows people to specify a base for the conversion of a string to an integer.

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int('101', 2) 5 int('a', 16) 10

I've sometimes missed a way to reverse the process. How would you like an optional second argument to str() that takes an int from 2 to 36?

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str(5, 2) '101' str(10, 16) 'a'

I know it's not a killer feature but it feels right to have a complement. How do you like the idea?

This was discussed before:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-January/059789.html

Seemed like people liked the concept, but there was a fair debate about syntax (should it be the str constructor, should it be an int method, etc.)

Steve -- I'm not *in*-sane. Indeed, I am so far *out* of sane that you appear a tiny blip on the distant coast of sanity. --- Bucky Katt, Get Fuzzy _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas

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We go over this about once a year. The conclusion is always the same: there isn't enough use for bases other than 2, 8, 10, 16 to bother including anything, and these are already covered by bin(), oct(), str() and hex(). (bin() is in 3.0 and to be backported to 2.6.) On 11/1/07, Adam Atlas wrote:

On 31 Oct 2007, at 06:02, Christian Heimes wrote:

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I know it's not a killer feature but it feels right to have a complement. How do you like the idea?

Christian

How about extending the int type's (and other numeric types', perhaps) implementation of __format__ (for py3k -- PEP 3101) so that it can take an optional format specifier component indicating the base?

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