Converting integer to binary representation

[Mark Dufour]

Hi all,

I need to convert an integer into some binary representation. I found the 
following code in the online cookbook (adapted to return a list):

binary = lambda n: n>0 and [n&1]+binary(n>>1) or []

This is sure nice, but I'm wondering why something like this doesn't seem to 
be in the standard library, for example by formatting with '%b' % number. I 
can't think of a any reason for not doing it this way, as working with binary 
representations is quite common in programming, but I guess I'm not a 
language designer.. (just yet ;)) Or is there another nice way of doing this 
which I overlooked?


Thanks,
Mark Dufour.
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