Converting integer to binary representation

[Fredrik Lundh]

"Mark Dufour" <m.dufour at student.tudelft.nl> wrote:

> I need to convert an integer into some binary representation. I found the
> following code in the online cookbook (adapted to return a list):
>
> binary = lambda n: n>0 and [n&1]+binary(n>>1) or []
>
> This is sure nice, but I'm wondering why something like this doesn't seem to
> be in the standard library, for example by formatting with '%b' % number. I
> can't think of a any reason for not doing it this way, as working with binary
> representations is quite common in programming,

really?  what kind of programs are you writing?

(in my experience, binary numbers only appear in programming text
books.   humans tend to use decimal numbers, and programmers use
octal or hexadecimal numbers when they need to "access the bits").

</F>