Recursive Property of Octal Numbers

[James Stroud]

I'm very curious about what is going on here. I'm sure my curiosity has
something to do with ignorance of some fundamental concept of computer
science (maybe that 8 is just a vertical infinity?):

py> b = '\xb6'
py> b[0]
'\xb6'
py> b[0][0]
'\xb6'
py> b[0][0][0]
'\xb6'
py> b[0][0][0][0]
'\xb6'
py> b[0][0][0][0][0]
'\xb6'



James

--
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/

 

[PoD]

I'm very curious about what is going on here. I'm sure my curiosity has
something to do with ignorance of some fundamental concept of computer
science (maybe that 8 is just a vertical infinity?):

py> b = '\xb6'
py> b[0]
'\xb6'
py> b[0][0]
'\xb6'
py> b[0][0][0]
'\xb6'
py> b[0][0][0][0]
'\xb6'
py> b[0][0][0][0][0]
'\xb6'



James

b is a 1 character string.
b[0] is a one character string which is the first character of b.
Therefore b[0] == b.

 

[Paul Rubin]

I'm very curious about what is going on here. I'm sure my curiosity has
something to do with ignorance of some fundamental concept of computer
science (maybe that 8 is just a vertical infinity?):

Python doesn't have a character type. A character is just a string of
length 1. So 'a'[0] is the same as 'a'. Thus 'a'[0][0][0]...[0] is
also the same as 'a'.

 

[Tim Roberts]

I'm very curious about what is going on here. I'm sure my curiosity has
something to do with ignorance of some fundamental concept of computer
science (maybe that 8 is just a vertical infinity?):

py> b = '\xb6'

8 doesn't have anything to do with it. What you have there is hexadecimal.
0377 is an example of an octal number.

However, as was pointed out elsewhere, the same thing would be true even if
you used 'z'.