On Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:32:29 +1000, Tom Harris wrote: > I agree. So did Forth's early designers. That is why Forth's number > parser considers a word that starts with a number and has embedded > punctuation to be a 32 bit integer, and simply ignores the punctuation. > I haven't used Forth in years, but it seems a neat solution to the > problem of decoding a long string of numbers: let the user put in > whatever they want, the parser ignores it. I usually used a comma (with > no surrounding whitespace of course), but it was your choice. You could > also do this in whatever base you were working in, so you could > punctuate a 32 bit hex number to correspond to the bit fields inside it. > Of course not applicable to Python.
That sounds like a great idea, except I'd specify non-period (.) punctuation, so it would go for floating points as well. Is there a language design guru who can say why inputs like 123,456.00 couldn't be handles as above? the only problem I can see is an abiguity in argument lists (e.g. mult(2,4) ) which could be handled by the inclusion of whitespace. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list