[Python-Dev] Strings: '\012' -> '\n'

[Guido van Rossum]

> [?!ng]
> > So... i'm submitting a patch that causes the three most common
> > special whitespace characters, '\n', '\r', and '\t', to appear in
> > their natural form rather than as octal escapes when strings are
> > printed and repr()ed.
> 
> -1 on doing that when they're printed (although I probably misunderstand
> what you mean there).

Ping was using imprecise language here -- he meant repr() and "printed
at the command line prompt."

> +1 for changing repr() as suggested.
> 
> -0 on generalizing to \a \b \f \v too (I've never used one of those in a
> string literal in my life, so would be more baffled by seeing one come back
> than I would the octal equivalent).
> 
> I would also be +1 on using hex escapes instead of octal (I grew up on 36-
> and 60-bit machines, but that was the last time octal looked *natural*!).

Me too.  One summer vacation while in college I had nothing better to
do than decode the Pascal runtime system for the University's CDC-6600
from an octal dump into assembly.  Learned lots!

> Octal and hex escapes both consume 4 characters, so I can't imagine what
> octal has going for it in the 21st century <wink>.

Originally, using \x for these was impractical (at least) because of
the stupid gobble-up-everything-that-looks-like-a-hex-digit semantics
of the \x escape.  Now we've fixed this, I agree.

> 377-is-an-irritating-way-to-spell-ff-ly y'rs  - tim
> 
> 
> PS:  Note that C doesn't define what numerical values \a etc have, just
> that:
> 
>     Each of these escape sequences shall produce a unique
>     implementation-defined value which can be stored in a single
>     char object. The external representations in a text file need
>     not be identical to the internal representations, and are
>     outside the scope of this International Standard.
> 
> The current method does have the advantage of extreme clarity.

Python doesn't support non-ASCII machines, like the C standard
(pretends to).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)