Antoine Pitrou <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> added the comment: > I think you are mistaken. Python always distinguished between floats > and integers
Sorry, my bad. > For example, if > bin is used inside f() only to produce some log output, but > otherwise f() works on any number, promiscuous bin() will actually > make an application using f() more robust. First I'm not sure bizarre log output should be considered "more robust". Second if you are outputting the bin() of an integer as part of a log output, it probably means the integer should be understood as a kind of bitfield, and then I don't see how accepting float values is "more robust" (again). Anyway Python doesn't accept floats for bit-wise operators (e.g. "1.0&128" raises TypeError). I still find this proposal undesirable, for several reasons: 1. while taking the binary representation of an integer has a real meaning, taking the binary representation of a float only exposes an implementation detail, that is the internal layout of float numbers. 2. if two numbers (one integer and one float) are equal, it sounds expectable that calling a function on them will produce similar output (or fail). Of course, this is not always the case, str(1) and str(1.0) are different. But they are not wildly different and the difference is still easily understood. While getting something like '0b11.001001000011111101101010100010001000010110100011' while you were waiting for '0b11' is disturbing. 3. I'm skeptical about the educational value. People who don't know about the internal layout of float numbers won't very likely feel enlightened by a string of 1s and 0s. Showing a bunch of bits does not really explain a structure. One related feature, though, would be to know whether a string representation of a float is exact or not. If we allowed repr() to lose its round-trippability, this could be implemented by making repr(0.5) return "0.5 (exact)" and repr(0.1) return "0.10000000000000001 (inexact)". Or this could be a dedicated method. > While writing my previous comments I did not realize that '%x' % > accepts floats: And witness how it does something rather intuitive (convert the argument to int) rather than show the internal layout of the float number in hexadecimal form :-) _______________________________________ Python tracker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://bugs.python.org/issue3008> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
