Tim Peters <tim.one@home.com>: > 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*!). > Octal and hex escapes both consume 4 characters, so I can't imagine what > octal has going for it in the 21st century <wink>. Tim, on the level of aesthetic preference I'm totally with you. I've always found octal really ugly myself. Hex fits my brain better; somehow I find it easier to visualize the bit patterns from. Sadly, there are so many other related ways in which Python intelligently follows C/Unix conventions that I think changing to a default of hex escapes rather than octal would violate the Rule of Least Surprise. One of the things I like about Python is precisely its conservatism in areas like string escapes, that Guido refrained from inventing new OS APIs or new conventions for things like string escapes in places where Unix and C did them in a well-established and reasonable way. He didn't make the mistake, all too typical in academic languages, of confusing novelty with value... This conservatism is valuable because it frees the C-experienced programmer's mind from having to think about where the language is trivially different, so he can concentrate on where it's importantly different. It's worth maintaining. On the other hand, the change would mesh well with the Unicode support. Hmm. Tough call. I could go either way, I guess. -- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a> The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder. -- Frederick Bastiat
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