Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them.

From	Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.python
Subject	Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them.
Date	2015-11-14 08:43 -0700
Message-ID	<mailman.329.1447515842.16136.python-list@python.org> (permalink)
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On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 10:40 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
> Python has operator overloading, so it can be anything you want it to be.
> E.g. you might have a DSL where +feature turns something on and -feature
> turns it off.

By that argument we should also have operators ~, !, $, \, ? because
some hypothetical DSL might someday want to use them for something.

> Decimal uses it to force the current precision and rounding, regardless of
> what the number was initiated to:
>
> Counter uses it to strip zero and negative counts:
>
> I would expect that symbolic maths software like Sympy probably has use of a
> unary plus operator, but I'm not sure.

Unary plus as normalization does not strike me as being very
intuitive. I never would have known about any of these if I hadn't
read the Counter case in the docs, and then I only remembered it
because it because it seemed janky. Unary minus on Counters is even
weirder, by the way: it first negates the signs of all the values, and
*then* normalizes by removing non-positive values. Who has ever needed
that?

For somebody reading one of these uses of unary plus in real code, I
imagine it would be a bit of a WTF moment if it's the first time
they've encountered it. I don't recall ever seeing any code that
actually used this, though.

> I might consider stealing an idea from Perl and Javascript, and have unary
> plus convert strings to a number:
>
> +"123"
> => returns int 123
> +"1.23"
> => returns float 1.23

Eww.

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Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-11-14 09:42 +1100
  Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> - 2015-11-14 13:40 +1100
    Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-11-14 14:01 +1100
      Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> - 2015-11-14 16:40 +1100
        Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com> - 2015-11-14 08:43 -0700
          Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-11-14 18:52 +0200
            Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-11-15 04:04 +1100
              Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> - 2015-11-16 19:19 +1300
            Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com> - 2015-11-14 10:04 -0700
              Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-11-14 23:53 +0200
              Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> - 2015-11-16 19:15 +1300
                Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> - 2015-11-16 23:11 +1100
                Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Dave Farrance <df@see.replyto.invalid> - 2015-11-17 09:54 +0000
            Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com> - 2015-11-14 10:13 -0700
            Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> - 2015-11-14 17:53 -0500
              Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-11-15 02:12 +0200
              Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> - 2015-11-15 12:14 +1100
                Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2015-11-15 11:09 -0500
                Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> - 2015-11-16 19:11 +1300
            Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. MRAB <python@mrabarnett.plus.com> - 2015-11-15 00:49 +0000
          Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> - 2015-11-15 13:08 +1100
            Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-11-15 13:23 +1100
              Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> - 2015-11-17 00:17 +1100
                Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-11-17 00:27 +1100
        Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-11-15 03:59 +1100
    Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com> - 2015-11-13 20:45 -0700
    Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com> - 2015-11-13 20:48 -0700
    Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-11-14 14:56 +1100
    Re: Problems using struct pack/unpack in files, and reading them. Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-11-14 14:57 +1100

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