[Python-3000] Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Octal

[CM]

On 3/15/07, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Thomas Wouters schrieb:
> >
> >
> > On 3/15/07, *Raymond Hettinger* <python at rcn.com <mailto:python at rcn.com>>
> > wrote:
> >
> >     My worry focuses on new-timers and SyntaxErrors. The worst part of
> >     the new user experience is encountering a SyntaxError.
> >
> >
> > Please. I already said it would be a SyntaxError *with explanation*.
> > It's pretty easy to make a syntax error that goes "Did you mean 0t6065
> > or 6065?". This would not be a syntax error handled by the parser, the
> > tokenizer really doesn't care about leading 0's and ast.c's parsenumber
> > (which would be the spot to raise it) has all the necessary information.
>
> Until now, I skipped the octal thread. Now I read this and wondered, "what
> the
> hell is 0t6065 supposed to mean" and only from the context I gathered that
> it
> would be an octal literal...
>
> Seriously, nobody, even coming from another language, will be able to look
> at it
> and say, "yes, that's an octal literal."


I agree wholeheartedly with this.  The argument that 'x' is the third
character of 'hexadecimal', so 't' would have some kind of nice symmetry
doesn't hold.  One of the reasons that 'x' is such a nice label to remember
is that its *pronunciation* (at least in English) matches that of the word
'hex'.  The letter 't' has no real resemblance to the word 'octal', except
that it happens to be a letter in the word.

Then again, we all had to learn that '0x' meant 'hex' once, so maybe 't'
isn't that big of a stretch.  I do think that addressing the pronunciation
would be a good idea, though.  I wonder if the '0' prefix was meant to be
pronounced "aught" in the beginning....

:-)

- C




Georg
>
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