[Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net>]
> ...
> The main difference is familiarity. "scientific" notation should be
> well-known and understood even by high school kids. Who knows about
> hexadecimal notation for floats, apart from floating-point experts?
Here's an example: you <0x0.2p0 wink>. For people who understand
both hex and (decimal) scientific notation, learning what hex float
notation means is easy.
> So for someone reading code, the scientific notation poses no problem
> as they understand it intuitively (even if they may not grasp the
> difficulties of the underlying conversion to binary FP), while for
> hexadecimal float notation need they have to go out of their way to
> learn about it, parse the number slowly and try to make out what its
> value is.
I've seen plenty of people on StackOverflow who (a) don't understand
hex notation for integers; and/or (b) don't understand scientific
notation for floats. Nothing is self-evident about either; they both
have to be learned at first. Same for hex float notation. Of course
it's true that many (not all) people do know about hex integers and/or
decimal scientific notation from prior (to Python) experience.
My objection is that we already have a way to use hex float notation,
and the _need_ for it is rare. If someone uninitiated sees a rare:
x = 0x1.aaap-4
they're going to ask on StackOverflow what the heck it's supposed to
mean. But if they see a rare:
x = float.fromhex("0x1.aaap-4")
they can Google for "python fromhex" and find the docs themselves at
once. The odd method name makes it highly "discoverable", and I think
that's a feature for rare gimmicks with a small, specialized audience.
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