On 2/6/20 7:03 AM, Jonathan Fine wrote:
SUMMARY
=========
It was once a good idea, for Python 3 to forbid leading zeroes in
integer literals. Since then circumstances have changed. Perhaps it's
now, or soon will be, a good time to permit this.
A SURPRISE
==========
I was surprised by:
>>> 0
0
>>> 00
0
>>> 000
0
>>> 001
SyntaxError: invalid token
Just thinking a bit, it should be safe to relax the prohibition for
numbers with only 1 significant digit. 02 is ok, 020 is not, since
numbers with 1 significant digit can't be misinterpreted.
As to when it would be safe to totally remove that protection, Python
2.x isn't dead yet, and really won't be for awhile. It may be that the
python developer have declared that support for it from them is over
(though there still is that last release in April still to come), but it
will still be alive, maybe on life support, while the various Long Term
Support distributions maintain it. That won't end till some time next
year by my understanding. And then you have people who will still use
the unsupported 2.7 while they work on switching over and trying to
figure out how to make their ancient code work on these new systems.
This doesn't mean that Python 3.x needs to bend over backwards to cater
to 2.7 users, but thought should be made that there are, and will be for
a while, People used to Python 2.x
In this particular case, since many other langagues and some operating
systems use as simple leading zero to indicate octal, it may make sense
to just keep the ambiguous numbers invalid forever. If we admit that the
reasoning is ambiguity, then allowing the single digit numbers could
make sense even if it does mean that writing the rule as a grammar is
complicated.
--
Richard Damon
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