Terry Reedy writes: > On 2/11/2010 11:23 AM, Jussi Piitulainen wrote: > > Robert Kern writes: > >> On 2010-02-11 06:31 AM, Shashwat Anand wrote: > >>> There is a little issue here that '>>> -.1 ** .1' should give you > >>> error message. That is it. > >> > >> No, fractional powers of negative numbers are perfectly valid > >> mathematically. The result is a complex number. In Python 3 (what > >> the OP is using), this has been implemented, but not in Python 2.6. > > > > Perhaps it should raise a MisleadingSpacingError at compile time. > > You forgot the smiley ;-). > > > The error message could recommend - .1**.1, or better -(.1 ** .1). > > The compiler would never see the difference between -.1 ** .1 and the > first and probably no difference with the second either.
It could be done the same way that the compiler keeps track of the source line numbers now: early phases annotate their output with any information that later phases may need. This error would be detected during syntactic analysis. :) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list