PureBasic Forum

Right. I forgot, although I often use it when working with string pointers. But it is the only case where the apostrophes are used.

Whether they are used elsewhere is moot. Numbers are used in identifiers, yet you can also use them in literal constants too. The separator would be treated the same, but would not be allowed as the leading character.

I think it always makes sense to look where a character is already used in the syntax to avoid making parsing the code unnecessarily more complicated or to avoid confusion when reading the code.

@All: Which character as number separator would you prefer?
In the meantime, I also tend to use apostrophes.

Characters with multiple usage:

$ String identifier
$ Hexadecimal literal

% Modulo operator
% Binary literal

~ Bitwise NOT operator
~ Escaped string literal

# Constant
# Separator in macros

The above characters are used several times without problems (ok, the hash sign as separator in macros I find suboptimal, but it' s the way it is).


The single quotation mark as a separator in numeric literals would not lead to any conflicts and in my humble opinion it would be better to read than with an underscore.

Josh, you skipped all of the numbers and letters that can make numbers as well as identifiers.

Sure, it makes sense to revaluate double use, but this is actually a perfect use case. I've used compilers that have done it.

Something like this has been requested already more than 7 years ago:
Commas in numbers

Comma would never work because it's a procedure parameter separator.

If you read the whole thread, then you'll see that there was not only discussed about commas. It's also not necessary to repeat that old descussion again now.

freaks solution is both clever and stupid.
underscore please. I'm not waiting for it though.

Exactly the same for me.

I have read this whole thread, as well as the one from 2013, which I also commented in. If we were required to refrain from duplication, we would have to delete this whole thread!

Statements of agreement, such as the one I made that you shunned, are merely comments. It was not, however, as unproductive than your presumptuous dig. Usually, you are a much more positive contributor than that.

Just because you don't understand what it's all about, doesn't mean that you are allowed to take that tone with me!

Even if I don't like number seperators,
there are some characters left: ^°´`
for separetion.

I don't think there's any point to this request anyway, because when you copy source codes from somewhere else (C++, StackOverflow, etc) then the separators aren't going to be there anyway. Are you going to manually change every number from the copied code?

So, -1 from me.

A prefix should be implemented to indicate such formatting, similar to the tilde (~) for escaping strings. Best to keep literals and formatting separate.