[Python-ideas] SI scale factors alone, without units or dimensional analysis

[Nick Timkovich]

Ah, always mess up micro = 6/9 until I think about it for half a second.
Maybe a "n" suffix could have saved me there ;) For "long" numbers there's
the new _ so you can say 0.000_000_1 if you so preferred for 0.1 micro (I
generally see _ as more useful for high-precison numbers with more non-zero
digits, e.g. 1_234_456_789). Would that be 0.1µ, 0.1u in a new system.

Veering a bit away from the 'suffixing SI prefixes for literals': Literal
unary suffix operators might be slightly nicer than multiplication if they
were #1 in operator precedence, then you could omit some parentheses. Right
now if I want to use a unit:

$ pip install quantities
import quantities as pq
F = 1 * pq.N
d = 1 * pq.m
F * d # => array(1.0) * m*N

but with literal operators & functions could be something like

F = 1 pq.N
d = 1 pq.m


On Sat, Oct 29, 2016 at 1:18 PM, Todd <toddrjen at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 29, 2016 at 12:43 PM, Nick Timkovich <prometheus235 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> From that page:
>>
>>> User-defined literals are basically normal function calls with a fancy
>>> syntax. [...] While user defined literals look very neat, they are not much
>>> more than syntactic sugar. There is not much difference between defining
>>> and calling a literal operator with "foo"_bar and doing the same with an
>>> ordinary function as bar("foo"). In theory, we could write literal
>>> operators that have side effects and do anything we want, like a normal
>>> function.
>>
>>
>> Obviously the arbitrary-function-part of that will never happen in Python
>> (yes?)
>>
>>
>>
> Why not?  It seems like that would solve a lot of use-cases.  People get
> bringing up various new uses for prefix or suffix syntax that they want
> built directly into the language.  Providing a generic way to implement
> third-party prefixes or suffixes would save having to put all of these
> directly into the language.  And it opens up a lot of other potential
> use-cases as well.
>
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