[Python-Dev] Int FutureWarnings and other 2.4 TODOs

[Aahz]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2003, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
> (2) PEP 237 promises that repr() of a long should no longer show a
>     trailing 'L'.  This is not yet implemented (i.e., repr() of a long
>     still has a trailing 'L').  First, past experience suggests that
>     quite a bit of end user code will break, and it may easily break
>     silently: there used to be code that did str(x)[:-1] (knowing x
>     was a long) to strip the 'L', which broke when str() of a long no
>     longer returned a trailing 'L'.  Apparently some of this code was
>     "fixed" by changing str() into repr(), and this code will now
>     break again.  Second, I *like* seeing a trailing L on longs,
>     especially when there's no reason for it to be a long: if some
>     expression returns 1L, I know something fishy may have gone on.

That makes sense to me; there should be an easy way from Python to
detect what kind of object you've got (as a string representation), and
repr() is precisely the place for it.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote 
programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.