On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 10:11:27 PDT, Bill Janssen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Are the base number operations in Python all that difficult to >> understand? > >Well, they're a little tricky. > >But the basic problem with "number" support, in almost every >programming language, is that they are too low-level an abstraction. >A number in a program is never *just* an integer or a float. It's >always an integer or float (or complex, OK) deployed in support of a >very specific purpose. It's a loop index, or a weight in kilos, or >the number of calendar entries for a particular day. It often has >units, and a fixed range of values or fixed set of values, neither of >which are taken into account in most programming languages. > >Strings really suffer from the same lack of focus. A string is never >just a string. It's a book title, or a filename, or a person's >surname, or an email address. It's usually got a particular human >language (or computer OS) associated with it. Each of these usages >has particular limitations and patterns which limit both its range of >values, and the operations which can be successfully applied to it.
I definitely agree with this, and resolving it would probably address a large class of mistakes made when doing any programming involving numbers and strings (anyone done much of that lately? :). Does the introduction of a lot of base classes for `int' and `float' do anything to address this, though? What you really want is a bunch of new subclasses of them, the opposite. Jean-Paul _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
