[Python-ideas] Negative hexes

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Sun, 4 Dec 2011 11:13:26 +1000
Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 3:07 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> >> This is because Python's integers are not limited to 32 bits or 64 bits. If
> >> you read PEP 237, you'll see that this was one of the hardest differences
> >> between ints and longs to be resolved. You'd have to include an infinite
> >> number of leading 'F' characters to format a negative long this way...
> >
> > That's a fair point :)
> 
> Random thought... could we use the integer precision field to fix
> *that*, by having it indicate the intended number of bytes in the
> integer?
> 
> That is, currently:
> 
> >>> "{:.4x}".format(31)
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> ValueError: Precision not allowed in integer format specifier

This is so poorly discoverable that I don't think it's worth it.
Guido's approach looks sufficient to me.

Regards

Antoine.