Right way to show numbers in binary/hex/octal in your opinion?

[Rumbu]

On Monday, 27 December 2021 at 09:55:46 UTC, Siarhei Siamashka 
wrote:
> On Monday, 27 December 2021 at 06:55:37 UTC, Rumbu wrote:
>> When people are dumping numbers to strings în any other base 
>> than 10, they are expecting to see the internal representation 
>> of that number.
>
> Different people may have different expectations and their 
> expectations may be not the same.

Your expectations must be congruent with the host architecture, 
otherwise you can have surprises (like the ones in phobos). The 
architecture has a limited domain and a certain way to represent 
numbers, they are not infinite. Otherwise computers should 
perform math ops using strings and you don't want that for 
performance reasons.

> I don't understand what's the problem here. It can be easily 
> solved by having a unit test, which verifies that "-0x80" gets 
> correctly converted to -128. Or have I missed something?

How can you convert 0x8000_0000_0000_0000 to long?

And if your response is "use a ulong", I have another one: how do 
you convert -0x8000_0000_0000_0000 to ulong.

>
>> This is also an issue în phobos:
>>
>> https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20452
>> https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18290
>
> To me this looks very much like just a self inflicted damage 
> and historical baggage, entirely caused by making wrong choices 
> in the past.

No, it's just the fact that phobos doesn't use the same 
convention for both senses of conversion. When converting from 
number to string, it uses the internal representation - 2's 
complement. When it is converting from string to number, it uses 
the "human readable" convention.