Re: How to get this space away?

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Fri, 5 Jun 2015 06:02:35 -0700 (PDT), Laurent <daemon2@internet.lu>
declaimed the following:

>On Wednesday, June 3, 2015 at 10:50:07 PM UTC+2, J-P. Rosen wrote:
>
>> This dates back to Ada83. The initial idea was that a positive number
>> and its opposite (negative) number should have the same number of
>> characters. Forcing a '+' to all positive number would not have been
>> pretty, so the design team chose to put a space for positive numbers
>> (negative numbers just have an initial '-').
>
>I won't argue about the ARG's wisdom or their choices but for me it still
>doesn't make sense. If I want to display a number (positive or negative, int,
> float, or whatever) in a string I always want it to be separated by a space.

	I suspect it is a carryover from pretty much most of the ancestral
languages. All the ones I learned on use one position for the sign, and
tend to suppress the "+" by using a space character.

	Granted those were formatted output conversions, not generic "print"
conversions. Nor where they modern scripting type languages.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/