On Mar 11, 2009, at 9:06 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
Raymond Hettinger wrote:
The current formatting mini-language provisions left/right/center
alignment, prefixes for 0b 0x 0o, and rules on when to show the
plus-sign. I think it would be far more useful to provision a simple
way of specifying a thousands separator.
Financial users in particular find the locale approach to be
frustrating
and non-obvious. Putting in a thousands separator is a common task
for
output destined to be read by non-programmers.
+1 for the general idea.
A specific syntax proposal:
[[fill]align][sign][#][0][minimumwidth][,sep][.precision][type]
'sep' is the new field that defines the thousands separator. It
appears
immediately before the precision specifier and starts with a leading
comma.
I believe this syntax is unambiguous and backwards compatible because
the only other place a comma might appear (the fill field) is required
to be followed by an alignment character.
You might be interested to know that in India, the commas don't come
every 3 digits. In india, they come every two digits, after the first
three. Thus one billion = 1,00,00,00,000. How are you gonna represent
*that* in a formatting mini-language? :)
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system
James
_______________________________________________
Python-Dev mailing list
Python-Dev@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
Unsubscribe:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
