Ben Finney wrote:
Yet, as was pointed out, that behaviour would be inconsistent with the concatenation of string literals::>>> "abc" r'def' u"ghi" 'jkl' u'abcdefghijkl' So, different representations of literals are parsed as separate literals, then concatenated. To have the behaviour you describe, the case needs to be made separately that digit concatenation should not be consistent with the established string literal parsing behaviour.
Since digit concatenation can't possibly be useful any other way, it makes perfect sense.
Why is the operator ** right-to-left associative? The same basic reason: Because it would be dumb for it not to be. Does that make it confusing and inconsistent compared to most of the other binary operators? In some sense, yes, it does. But it also makes it sane. Is anyone so upset by this that it didn't make it into the language, or cause huge confusion on a regular basis that upsets a lot of users? Nope.
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