Re: Underscores in numbers for legibility Lassi Kortela 12 Apr 2019 22:17 UTC
> I also think this will definitely break backwards compatibility for > non-base prefixed numbers. That's actually worse than the complexity > (which is managable). Hmm. If we assume the most restricted syntax proposal so far for non-prefixed numbers, that would mean that somebody wrote tokens like 1_234_567 in a source file and expected them to parse as symbols. Or generated source files containing tokens like that -- but most languages outside the Lisp family parse that as a number anyway, since it starts with a digit, so it's not clear for what purpose those things would have been generated. Internally it would still be possible to represent symbols like 1_000_000, i.e. (symbol? (string->symbol "1_000_000")) would still work and return #t. Those symbols could just not be read in by the reader. Unless you use pipes '|1_000_000| in which case it would be parsed as a symbol as it now is.