> Prompted in part by the comment in Michael Hudson's > python-dev summary about this discussion having died, > I'd like to summarize: > > 1. Most people who commented felt that a base-2 format > would be useful, if only for teaching and debugging. > With regard to questions about byte order: > > A. Integer values are printed as base-2 numbers, so > byte order is irrelevant. > > B. Floating-point numbers are printed as: > > [sign] [mantissa] [exponent] > > The mantissa and exponent are shown according > to rule A. Why bother with floats at all? We can't print floats as hex either. If I were doing any kind of float-representation fiddling, I'd probably want to print it in hex anyway (I can read hex). But as I say, that's not for the general public. > 2. Inventing a format for converting to arbitrary > bases is dubious hypergeneralization (to borrow a > phrase). Agreed. > 3. Implementation should mirror octal and hexadecimal > support, e.g. a 'bin()' function to go with 'oct()' > and 'hex()'. > > 4. The desirability or otherwise of a "%b" format > specifier has nothing to do with the relative > merits of any early microprocessor :-). > > If no-one has strong objections, I'll put together a > PEP on this basis. Go for it. Or just submit a patch to SF -- this seems almost too small for a PEP to me. :-) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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