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Kelvin Wangonya
Kelvin Wangonya

Posted on • Originally published at wangonya.com on

1_000_000_000 = 1000000000

With Python 3.6+, you can make long numbers in your code more legible by separating the digits with underscores.

Python 3.7.4 

>>> x = 1_000_000_000 
>>> x
1000000000
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Top comments (11)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Same in Ruby πŸ™‚

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luisacosta profile image
Luis Acosta

Same in Java from jdk7 ;)

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wangonya profile image
Kelvin Wangonya • Edited

Yeah, this is kind of a norm in most programming languages. I'm surprised it wasn't available in Python for so long.

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

Really? I've seen far more without it than with it. I mean, yeah Ruby can do it, and so can Elixir and Erlang (which while not the originator, is probably the source of influence for many modern languages that can), but other than those three, almost every language I've ever worked with either doesn't support it, or doesn't at all document that it supports it.

In fact, almost three years after it was added to Python, the only places I can find it in their documentation are the formal syntax definition (which next to nobody reads unless they're writing their own Python implementation or parsing tools) and the release notes for 3.6 (which were likely read by only marginally more people than the formal syntax definitions).

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wangonya profile image
Kelvin Wangonya

Well, Wikipedia lists Ada, C# (from version 7.0), D, Eiffel, Haskell (from GHC version 8.6.1), Java (from version 7), Julia, Perl, Ruby, and Swift in addition to Python as languages which support that... I guess I read that and interpreted it wrongly as 'most'. I've made the edit. Thanks for the heads-up.

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Zeyad Etman

same in javascript :D

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Dante CalderΓ³n

how?

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zeyadetman profile image
Zeyad Etman

Here's a blog post about this: v8.dev/features/numeric-separators

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David MMπŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’»

This is one thing that I know I can do, but I always forget to do.

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Nick Cinger

This was recently added to PHP as well, nice to see good ideas spreading across languages!

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SachaDee

Nice one! Thanks!