[Python-Dev] str with base

[Steve Holden]

Nick Coghlan wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
>>On 1/19/06, Fredrik Lundh <fredrik at pythonware.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Guido van Rossum wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>I think we ought to let this sit for a while and come back to it in a
>>>>few week's time. Is 'base' really the right name? It could just as
>>>>well be considered a conversion in the other direction.
>>>
>>>the same applies to hex and oct, of course.
>>
>>Right. And this is not a hypothetical issue either -- in Perl, hex and
>>oct *do* work the other way I believe. More reasons to get rid of
>>these in Python 3000. Perhaps we should also get rid of hex/oct
>>lterals?
> 
> 
> I'm not aware of anyone that would miss octal literals, but there are plenty 
> of hardware weenies like me that would find "int("DEAD", 16)" less convenient 
> than "0xDEAD". Python is a bit too heavyweight for a lot of embedded work, but 
> its *great* for writing host-based test harnesses.
> 
> I quite like the suggestion of using 'math.base' rather than a builtin, but 
> there are still issues to be figured out there:
>    - the math module is currently a thin wrapper around C's "math.h". Do we 
> really want to change that by adding more methods?
>    - is 'base' the right name?
>    - should we allow a "digits" argument, or just the radix argument?
> 
Another possibility, since Python 3 can break backward compatibility: we 
could take a page out of Icon's book and use an "rN" suffix for 
non-decimal literals.

     23 == 27r8 == 17r16

regards
  Steve
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