> [?!ng] > > So... i'm submitting a patch that causes the three most common > > special whitespace characters, '\n', '\r', and '\t', to appear in > > their natural form rather than as octal escapes when strings are > > printed and repr()ed. > > -1 on doing that when they're printed (although I probably misunderstand > what you mean there). Ping was using imprecise language here -- he meant repr() and "printed at the command line prompt." > +1 for changing repr() as suggested. > > -0 on generalizing to \a \b \f \v too (I've never used one of those in a > string literal in my life, so would be more baffled by seeing one come back > than I would the octal equivalent). > > I would also be +1 on using hex escapes instead of octal (I grew up on 36- > and 60-bit machines, but that was the last time octal looked *natural*!). Me too. One summer vacation while in college I had nothing better to do than decode the Pascal runtime system for the University's CDC-6600 from an octal dump into assembly. Learned lots! > Octal and hex escapes both consume 4 characters, so I can't imagine what > octal has going for it in the 21st century <wink>. Originally, using \x for these was impractical (at least) because of the stupid gobble-up-everything-that-looks-like-a-hex-digit semantics of the \x escape. Now we've fixed this, I agree. > 377-is-an-irritating-way-to-spell-ff-ly y'rs - tim > > > PS: Note that C doesn't define what numerical values \a etc have, just > that: > > Each of these escape sequences shall produce a unique > implementation-defined value which can be stored in a single > char object. The external representations in a text file need > not be identical to the internal representations, and are > outside the scope of this International Standard. > > The current method does have the advantage of extreme clarity. Python doesn't support non-ASCII machines, like the C standard (pretends to). --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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