[Python-Dev] PEP 515: Underscores in Numeric Literals

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 10:53:09PM +0000, Paul Moore wrote:
> On 10 February 2016 at 22:20, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:
> > This came up in python-ideas, and has met mostly positive comments,
> > although the exact syntax rules are up for discussion.
> 
> +1 on the PEP. Is there any value in allowing underscores in strings
> passed to the Decimal constructor as well? The same sorts of
> justifications would seem to apply. It's perfectly arguable that the
> change for Decimal would be so rarely used as to not be worth it,
> though, so I don't mind either way in practice.

Let's delay making any change to string conversions for now, and that 
includes Decimal. We can also do this:

Decimal("123_456_789.00000_12345_67890".replace("_", ""))


for those who absolutely must include underscores in their numeric 
strings. The big win is for numeric literals, not numeric string 
conversions.



-- 
Steve