This seems like a pretty uncommon use case.
But are there applications to other contexts where we might want easy line
continuation?
-CHB
On Tue, Feb 4, 2020 at 6:55 AM Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Feb 2020 at 10:39, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> >
> > I've been doing some work with large ints, of well over 100 digits. For
> > example, this number has 131 digits:
> >
> > P =
> 29674495668685510550154174642905332730771991799853043350995075531276838753171770199594238596428121188033664754218345562493168782883
> >
> > Sometimes I'm tempted to write numbers like that as follows:
> >
> > P = int('29674495668685510550154174642905332730771991'
> > '79985304335099507553127683875317177019959423'
> > '8596428121188033664754218345562493168782883')
> >
> > which is nicer to read, except for the minor annoyance of the call to
> > int and the string delimiters.
> >
> > That got me thinking that it might be Nice To Have if we could split
> > long int literals across multiple lines:
> >
> > P = 29674495668685510550154174642905332730771991\
> > 79985304335099507553127683875317177019959423\
> > 8596428121188033664754218345562493168782883
> >
> > Or if you don't like backslashes, trailing underscores are currently
> > illegal, so we could use them:
> >
> > P = 29674495668685510550154174642905332730771991_
> > 79985304335099507553127683875317177019959423_
> > 8596428121188033664754218345562493168782883
> >
> >
> > Thoughts?
>
> My immediate instinct was underscores so I favour that over
> backslashes. And I think that if you need to write huge numbers like
> that then having a better way to break them up is important (you don't
> use internal underscores at all in your example, which surprises me,
> as that would be the first thing I'd do).
>
> But I would ask, do you *really* type numbers like that in manually???
> I can imagine them being output from another program, or from
> information in a webpage, that you copy and paste in here, but I'd be
> more likely to address that with a comment above the definition,
> saying how to regenerate the number, and that it was copy-and-pasted
> from that output. If you're copy/pasting, having to reformat is more
> awkward, rather than less.
>
> Can you share a bit more about why you need to do this? In the
> abstract, having the ability to split numbers over lines seems
> harmless and occasionally useful, but conversely it's not at all
> obvious why anyone would be doing this in real life.
>
> Paul
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--
Christopher Barker, PhD
Python Language Consulting
- Teaching
- Scientific Software Development
- Desktop GUI and Web Development
- wxPython, numpy, scipy, Cython
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