Numeric literals in other than base 10 - was Annoying octal notation

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:23:06 -0700, James Harris wrote:

> Sure but while I wouldn't normally want to type something as obscure as
> 32"rst" into a file of data I might want to type 0xff00 or similar. That
> is far clearer than 65280 in some cases.
> 
> My point was that int('ff00', 16) is OK for the programmer but cannot be
> used generally as it includes a function call.


No, it's the other way around. If you have *data*, whether entered at run 
time by the user or read from a file, you can easily pass it to a 
function to convert to an int. (In fact you have to do this anyway, 
because the data will be a string and you need an int.) 

If you want your data file to have values entered in hex, or oct, or even 
unary (1=one, 11=two, 111=three, 1111=four...) you can. There's no need 
to have the user enter int('ff00', 16) to get hex, just have them enter 
ff00.

But when writing *code*, you want syntax which will accept integers in 
the most common bases (decimal, a distant second hex, an even more 
distant third octal, and way out on the horizon binary) without the 
runtime cost of a function call.



-- 
Steven