As Victor Stinner mentioned in a recent thread, there's a patch in the works to add a numbits ... um ... gadget to integers, returning the number of bits needed to represent the integer (or more precisely, the ceiling of the log to base 2 of the integer). See
http://bugs.python.org/issue3439 Question for python-dev: if numbits were to be added, should it be a property or a method? (Or something else entirely?) More generally, what are the guidelines for determining when it's appropriate to make something a property rather than a method? In favour of numbits being a (read-only, of course) property: - it looks nicer that way - it's a fast O(1) method, so is comparable to an attribute access in terms of efficiency - it can reasonably be thought of as a fundamental property of a binary integer - there are precedents, as Raymond points out in the issue discussion: e.g. z.real, z.imag Thoughts? Mark _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
