Too much builtins (was Re: Python's simplicity philosophy

[Georgy Pruss]

"Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> wrote in message news:eAxub.5080$sb4.3591 at newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net...
| Georgy Pruss:
| > To me, it's very wrong that you can read any radix numbers, but can't
| > print them. If str(int(s)) == s and int(str(n)) == n (with some limits), I
| don't
| > see why str(n,radix) can't be symmetrical to int(s,radix).
|
| But your objection would also be handled with a special-case function
| which only took an int/long and a base and returned the string
| representation for that base, no? This could be a method or a class
| method of int, or a new function in math.

I have such function already. :)

|  What makes it special enough
| to warrant being part of the string constructor?

Just wanted to get rid of some useless builtin functions and make the
language prettier.

I wouldn't mind if Python had some analog of scanf() as an opposite
operator to '%'.

BTW is there some Python's equivalents to C's strspn, strcspn, strpbrk,
which return a leading sub-string, entirely [not] consisting of characters
of some char.set; and something like strtoul which parses the string and
returns the number and the position where the scan ended?

| > BTW there's no symmetry for str() and list()/tuple()/dict() etc.
|
| There is a symmetry for str(float(s)) == s and str(complex(s)) == s.
| Why shouldn't those take a base?
|
| Well, almost symmetry.  str(float("1.1")) != "1.1"

Fortunatelly, str() here is a bit wiser than repr().
>>> str(float("1.1")) == "1.1"
True

Regarding the complex numbers, I guess the inconsistency with them
is to some extent the consequence of the fact that Python has no
complex literals (contrary to e.g. J) and the str(cmplx) returns some
expression in parenthesis instead of one complex number. So this
case is the same as with lists and other compound objects.

Georgy

|                     Andrew
|                     dalke at dalkescientific.com
|