PEP0238 lament

[Steve Horne]

On Tue, 24 Jul 2001 08:56:53 +0000 (UTC), Duncan Booth
<duncan at NOSPAMrcp.co.uk> wrote:

>Stephen Horne <steve at lurking.demon.co.uk> wrote in 
>news:gmhplt4kitb3514p6kkdfg1kgl1eqr1fqg at 4ax.com:
>
>> If you had as many cases of "£"+str(Amount/100)+"."+str(amount%100)
>> and similar in your code as I do
>
>This is an example where even today you might be better off writing 
>"£%d.%02d" % divmod(Amount, 100)
>especially if you ever have single digit pennies.

The code examples were simplified to get to the point, but this is
true - barring a few points...

1.  A lot of people these scripts are passed on to are non-programmers
    who, nonetheless, need to do some fiddling to keep things up to
    date.

    Separate / and % with formatting done longhand (and with the
    number of digits required specified, of course) tend to cause less
    confusion.

2.  I just plain habitually use / and % anyway, having a C and C++
    background and having never (previously) had a reason to change.

3.  I dislike % substitution because I dislike sprintf formatting, and
    besides - I tend to think it should specify the subscript for the
    data to substitute in the string - not just rely on the list/tuple
    order.

Not a particularly *good* reason in point 3, but theres a little bit
of irrationality in most people.

-- 
Steve Horne
Home : steve at lurking.demon.co.uk
Work : sh at ttsoftware.co.uk