[Python-Dev] Re: long formatting

[Tim Peters]

Alas, Guido and I have the same ISP (@home), and its mail server has been
dead all day.  Conveniently <snort>, my other ISP (MSN) coincidentally
stopped letting me send email over my cable connection too.

[Guido]
> I just skimmed the pipermail python-dev archives and found one item
> to pronounce on: what "%o" should do with negative longs.  I agree
> with Tim.  Also for "%x".  Reason: this matches oct() and hex().

Good point!

> >>> oct(-10L)
> '-012L'
> >>> oct(-10)
> '037777777766'

Note that this string varies across platforms.

> >>> hex(-10L)
> '-0xAL'
> >>> hex(-10)
> '0xfffffff6'

Ditto.

> >>>
>
> Compatibility be damned (in this case).

This became SF bug 123859, and has been closed.  Current CVS does:

>>> "%#o" % -10L
'-012'
>>> "%#X" % -10L
'-0XA'
>>>

> (One could argue that for plain ints, the same result are
> desirable; however when these are used as bitmasks, I as human
> reader prefer to see '0xfffffff6' rather than '-0xA'.  Ah the
> insanity of consistency!)

I doubt that we're done with this forever:  we're moving in the direction of
erasing user-visible distinctions between ints and longs.  For bitmask
output, we should probably introduce a new format code.

Fred, I see that you complained about Finn's output examples, but didn't say
why (just "they both look incorrect").  Were you hallucinating, or do you
have a legit complaint?