[Python-ideas] Input characters in strings by decimals (Was: Proposal for default character representation)

[Mikhail V]

In past discussion about inputing and printing characters,
I was proposing decimal notation instead of hex.
Since the discussion was lost in off-topic talks, I'll try to
summarise my idea better.

I use ASCII only for code input (there are good reasons for that).
Here I'll use Python 3.6, and Windows 7, so I can use print() with unicode
directly and it works now in system console.

Suppose I only start programming and want to do some character manipulation.
The vey first thing I would probably start with is a simple output for
latin and cyrillic capital letters:

caps_lat = ""
for o in range(65, 91):
    caps_lat =  caps_lat + chr(o)
print (caps_lat)

caps_cyr = ""
for o in range(1040, 1072):
    caps_cyr =  caps_cyr + chr(o)
print (caps_cyr)


Which prints:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
АБВГДЕЖЗИЙКЛМНОПРСТУФХЦЧШЩЪЫЬЭЮЯ


Say, I want now to input something direct in code:

s = "first cyrillic letters: " + chr(1040) + chr(1041) + chr(1042)

Which works fine and has clean look. However it is not very convinient
because of much typing and also, if I generate such strings,
adds a bit more complexity. But in general it is fine, and I use this
method currently.

=========
Proposal: I would want to have a possibility to input it *by decimals*:

s = "first cyrillic letters: \{1040}\{1041}\{1042}"
or:
s = "first cyrillic letters: \(1040)\(1041)\(1042)"

=========

This is more compact and seems not very contradictive with
current Python escape characters in string literals.
So backslash is a start of some escaping in most cases.

For me most important is that in such way I would avoid
any presence of hex numbers in strings, which I find very good
for readability and for me it is very convinient since I use decimals
for processing everywhere (and encourage everyone to do so).

So this is my proposal, any comments on this are appreciated.


PS:

Currently Python 3 supports these in addition to \x:
(from https://docs.python.org/3/howto/unicode.html)
"""
If you can’t enter a particular character in your editor or want to keep
the source code ASCII-only for some reason, you can also use escape
sequences in string literals.

>>> "\N{GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA}"  # Using the character name
>>> "\u0394"                          # Using a 16-bit hex value
>>> "\U00000394"                      # Using a 32-bit hex value

"""
So I have many possibilities and all of them strangely contradicts with
my image of intuitive and readable. Well, using charater name is readable,
but seriously not much of a practical solution for input, but could be
very useful
for printing description of a character.


Mikhail