On 8 December 2016 at 17:52, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> In the first place, many people have pointed out to you that Unicode > *is* laid out best in hexadecimal. Ok if it is aligned intentionally on binary grid obviously hex numbers will show some patterns, but who argues? And to be fair, from my examples for Cyrillic: Range start points in hex vs decimal: capitals: U+0410 #1040 lowercase: U+0430 #1072 So I need one number 1040 to remember, then if I know if it is 32 letters (except Ё) I just sum 1040 + 32 and get 1072, and this will be the beginning of lowercase range, there are of course people who can efficiently sum and substract in head with hex, but I am not the one (guess who is in minority here), and there is no need to do it in this case. So if I know distances between ranges I can do it all much easier in head. Not a strong argument? To be more pedantic, if you know the fact that in Russian alphabet there are exactly 33 letters and not 32 as one could suggest from unicode table, you could have notice also that: letter Ё is U+0401, and ё is U+0451 This means they are torn away from other letters and does not even lie in the range. In practice, this means if I want to filter against code ranges, I need to additionally check the value U+0451 and U+0401. Is it not because someone decided to align the alphabet in such a way? Alignment is not bad idea, but it should not contradict with common sense. > You have to show > that decimal isn't just marginally better than hex; you have to show > that there are situations where the value of decimal character > literals is so great that it's worth forcing everyone to learn two > systems. And I'm not convinced you've even hit the first point. Frankly I don't fully understand your point here. Everyone knows decimal, address of an element in a table is a number, in most cases I don't need to learn it by heart, since it is already known and written in some table on your PC. Also inputting characters by decimal is very common thing, alternates key combos (Alt+0192) is something very well established and many people *do* learn decimal code points by heart, including me. So now it is you who want me to learn two numbering systems for no reason. And even with all that said, it is not the strongest argument. Most important is that hex notation is an ugly circumstance, and in this case there is too little reason to introduce it in the algorithm which just checks the ranges and specific values. And for *specific single* values it is absolutely irrelevant which alignment do you have. You just choose what is better readable and/or common for abstract numbers. But that is other big question, and current hex notation does not fall into category "better readable" anyway. Mikhail _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/