%a format

[Skip Montanaro]

    John> Is there any reason python's printf-style formatting is missing
    John> the (C99) '%a' specifier?

    >> Can you provide a patch against Objects/stringobject.c in the
    >> distribution?  Note that Python uses sprintf() to do its dirty work,
    >> so any patch would have to implement %a itself to remain compatible
    >> with C89.

    John> is remaining compatible with C89 a requirement?

For the forseeable future I suspect so.  It was only a couple years ago that
ANSI C became a requirement for building CPython.  Martin v. Löwis could
provide a more authoritative response.

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