[Tutor] built in functions int(),long()

[Magnus Lyckå]

At 12:47 2003-06-19 -0600, Bob Gailer wrote:
>"base 10" is ambiguous. We usually interpret that to mean the decimal 
>system, but an 8 fingered alien who counts in octal would say "base 10" 
>and it would mean octal.

Oh no Bob. There are only 10 reasonable ways to
understand the number 10. The right way, and the
wrong way! :)

Actually, it might be better to write "base(9+1)"...

(Now you know it, I'm a dolphin and I only have
two flippers... ;)

It's funny btw, I've mentioned before that I feel
that Jeff Shannon often seem to write just what I
am thinking, and today (oops, yesterday, it's past
midnight again) we both felt that we had to print
a sequence of asterisks to present numbers. Maybe
that's the only unambiguous way?

Base(* * * * * * * * * *) ?

Perhaps the positional number system is fundamentally
flawed?

(Or as the father in Patric Leconte's "The Hairdresser's
Husband" put it: "What is the difference between an
ordinary dog and a binary dog?
The ordinary dog has one head, one tail and four legs.
The binary dog has one head, one tail, one leg, one leg,
one leg and one leg." :)


--
Magnus Lycka (It's really Lyckå), magnus@thinkware.se
Thinkware AB, Sweden, www.thinkware.se
I code Python ~ The Agile Programming Language