Complex literals (was Re: I am never going to complain about Python again)

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 11 October 2013 12:49:40 Roy Smith did opine:

> In article <mailman.1001.1381491074.18130.python-list at python.org>,
> 
>  Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If someone tried to explain why their field couldn't use ً for the
> > circumference of a unit circle I would suggest that they adjust the
> > other parts of their notation not ً (there are other uses of ً.
> 
> Pi is wrong:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7vhMMXagQ

The funnily/serious part of this current "comedy central session" is that, 
speaking as someone who was too busy fixing tv's for a living in the 1950 
era, to go far enough in school to get any really higher math, (algebra 
enough to solve ohms law etc was all I usually needed) the above argument 
has always made perfect sense to me, and I have often arrived at the 
correct answer to some problem by using 2Pi, but usually without calling it 
Tau.  And even that wasn't needed often enough to keep my mind fresh about 
it. But I managed to get the job done anyway, those two tv cameras that 
were on the Trieste when it went into the Challenger Deep in 1960 had 
traces of my fingerprints in them.

Cheers, Gene
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