[Python-ideas] Negative hexes

[Nick Coghlan]

On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 5:13 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 3:07 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net>
>> wrote:
>> >> This is because Python's integers are not limited to 32 bits or 64
>> >> bits. If
>> >> you read PEP 237, you'll see that this was one of the hardest
>> >> differences
>> >> between ints and longs to be resolved. You'd have to include an
>> >> infinite
>> >> number of leading 'F' characters to format a negative long this way...
>> >
>> > That's a fair point :)
>>
>> Random thought... could we use the integer precision field to fix
>> *that*, by having it indicate the intended number of bytes in the
>> integer?
>>
>> That is, currently:
>>
>> >>> "{:.4x}".format(31)
>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
>> ValueError: Precision not allowed in integer format specifier
>>
>> What if instead that produced:
>>
>> >>> "{:.4X}".format(31)
>> 0000001F
>> >>> "{:.4X}".format(-31)
>> FFFFFFE1
>
>
> Usually that field is measured in characters/digits, so this should probably
> produce FFE1; you'd need {:.8X} to produce FFFFFFE1. This would then
> logically extend to binary and octal, in each case measuring
> characters/digits in the indicated base.

True, I guess it's just a matter of dividing the bit width by 2 for
binary, 3 for octal (rounding up) and 4 for binary. (My brain was
locked into bytes mode for some reason, so converting to character
counts seemed overly complicated - of course, if you go directly from
bits to characters, it's no more complicated than converting to a
bytes count).

".4d" would still raise an exception, though - I don't know of any
obvious way to make two's complement notation meaningful in base 10.

For numbers that didn't fit in the specified precision, I'd also
suggest raising ValueError.

This would be tinkering with the behaviour of builtin, so I guess it
would need a PEP? (I already have too many of those in train...
although I did just tidy that up a bit by officially deferring
consideration of the ImportEngine PEP until 3.4 at the earliest)

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia