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Title: Unexpected Parsing of Numeric Literals Concatenated with Boolean Operators
Type: behavior Stage: resolved
Components: Interpreter Core Versions: Python 3.10
process
Status: closed Resolution: fixed
Dependencies: Superseder:
Assigned To: Nosy List: Anthony Sottile, Carl.Friedrich.Bolz, Guido.van.Rossum, Joshua.Landau, alimuldal, gvanrossum, miss-islington, nedbat, pablogsal, pxeger, rhettinger, rrauenza, sco1, serhiy.storchaka, shreyanavigyan, steve.dower
Priority: normal Keywords: patch

Created on 2021-04-13 18:27 by sco1, last changed 2022-04-11 14:59 by admin. This issue is now closed.

Pull Requests
URL Status Linked Edit
PR 25466 merged serhiy.storchaka, 2021-04-18 15:12
PR 26614 merged miss-islington, 2021-06-08 23:31
Messages (27)
msg390981 - (view) Author: sco1 (sco1) Date: 2021-04-13 18:27
Came across this riddle today:

>>> [0x_for x in (1, 2, 3)]
[15]

Initially I thought this was related to PEP 515 but the unexpected behavior extends to simpler examples as well, such as:

>>> x = 5
>>> 123or x
123
>>> 123and x
5

I'm not familiar enough with C to understand why this is being parsed/tokenized this way, but this seems like it should instead be a SyntaxError. This appears to be fairly old behavior, as the non-underscored version works back to at least 2.7.

And a bonus:

>>> 0x1decade or more
31378142
msg390984 - (view) Author: sco1 (sco1) Date: 2021-04-13 18:43
Sorry, the bonus, while fun, I don't think is related
msg390988 - (view) Author: Alistair Muldal (alimuldal) Date: 2021-04-13 19:07
Several other keywords seem to be affected, including `if`, `else`, `is`, and `in`
msg390991 - (view) Author: Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick (Carl.Friedrich.Bolz) * Date: 2021-04-13 19:18
It's not just about keywords. Eg '1x' tokenizes too but then produces a syntax error in the parser. Keywords are only special in that they can be used to write syntactically meaningful things with these concatenated numbers.
msg390993 - (view) Author: Pablo Galindo Salgado (pablogsal) * (Python committer) Date: 2021-04-13 19:33
This is know behaviour unfortunately and cannot be changed because of backwards compatibility.
msg390995 - (view) Author: Serhiy Storchaka (serhiy.storchaka) * (Python committer) Date: 2021-04-13 19:43
Good example! Similar issue was discussed on the mailing list 3 years ago
(https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/thread/D2WPCITHG2LBQAP7DBTC6CY26WQUBAKP/#D2WPCITHG2LBQAP7DBTC6CY26WQUBAKP). Now with new example it perhaps should be reconsidered.
msg390996 - (view) Author: Shreyan Avigyan (shreyanavigyan) * Date: 2021-04-13 19:50
Hi. I'm totally confused about other keywords but I'm a little concerned about the "and", "or" operator when used on, not only "int" (also known as "long") but also most Python objects other then bool type.

Mostly when used on Python built-in objects "and", "or" keyword returns a very peculiar result. The "and" keyword returns the Python object on the left hand side while "or" returns the Python object on the right hand side. This applies to all Python object, built-in or user-defined, unless it has a specific __and__ or __or__ method defined. 

What is actually going on?
msg390997 - (view) Author: Pablo Galindo Salgado (pablogsal) * (Python committer) Date: 2021-04-13 19:58
We tried changing this IIRC and it broke code in the stdlib (now reformatted) so it will break code in the wild. I am not sure the gains are worth it.
msg390998 - (view) Author: Serhiy Storchaka (serhiy.storchaka) * (Python committer) Date: 2021-04-13 19:58
Better example:

>>> [0x1for x in (1,2)]
[31]

The code is parsed as [0x1f or x in (1,2)] instead of [0x1 for x in (1,2)] as you may expect.
msg390999 - (view) Author: Pablo Galindo Salgado (pablogsal) * (Python committer) Date: 2021-04-13 20:00
Precisely because examples like that changing this is a breaking change. Don't get me wrong: I would love to change it, but I don't know if is worth the risk
msg391001 - (view) Author: sco1 (sco1) Date: 2021-04-13 20:09
Appreciate the additional historical context, I also was pointed to this in the documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#whitespace-between-tokens

If a parsing change is undesired from a backwards compatibility standpoint, would it be something that could be included in PEP 8?
msg391002 - (view) Author: Anthony Sottile (Anthony Sottile) * Date: 2021-04-13 20:23
here's quite a few other cases as well -- I'd love for this to be clarified in PEP8 such that I can rationalize crafting a rule for it in `pycodestyle` -- https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle/issues/371
msg391003 - (view) Author: Pablo Galindo Salgado (pablogsal) * (Python committer) Date: 2021-04-13 20:25
One thing we could consider as Serhiy proposed on the mailing list is to emit a Syntax Warning. The ambiguous cases are specially scary so I think that makes sense
msg391042 - (view) Author: Shreyan Avigyan (shreyanavigyan) * Date: 2021-04-14 08:09
Hi. I just want to know why is and, or operators behaving like this. The behavior is described in https://bugs.python.org/issue43833#msg390996. Moreover I researched a little more and found out even if __and__, __or__ methods are defined the and, or operators doesn't seem to work. As Serhiy described in https://bugs.python.org/issue43833#msg390998 the parser reads [0x1for x in (1,2)] as [0x1f or x in (1,2)] which is the parser's fault but why is the or operator behaving like that?
msg391050 - (view) Author: Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick (Carl.Friedrich.Bolz) * Date: 2021-04-14 09:14
@shreyanavigyan This is a bit off-topic, but it's called "short-circuiting", described here: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#boolean-operations-and-or-not
(or/and aren't really "operators", like +/- etc, they cannot be overridden, they evaluate their components lazily and are therefore almost control flow)
msg391051 - (view) Author: Shreyan Avigyan (shreyanavigyan) * Date: 2021-04-14 09:20
@Carl.Friedrich.Bolz Thanks a lot for clarifying. For a second, I thought it was maybe a bug.
msg391335 - (view) Author: Serhiy Storchaka (serhiy.storchaka) * (Python committer) Date: 2021-04-18 15:25
PR 25466 makes the tokenizer emitting a deprecation warning if the numeric literal is followed by one of keywords which are valid after numeric literals. In future releases it will be changed to syntax warning, and finally to syntax error.

It is breaking change, because it makes invalid currently allowed syntax like `0 in x` or `1or x` (but `0or x` is already error).

See also issue21642 which allowed parsing "1else" as "1 else". Not all were agreed with that fix.

Perhaps we need to rewrite also some paragraphs in the language specification.
msg391336 - (view) Author: sco1 (sco1) Date: 2021-04-18 16:18
We can also see this kind of thing with other literals, would that be in scope here?

e.g.

```
Python 3.9.4 (default, Apr  5 2021, 12:33:45) 
[Clang 12.0.0 (clang-1200.0.32.29)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> "foo"in ["foo", "bar"]
True
>>> [1,]in [[1,]]
True
```
msg391340 - (view) Author: Serhiy Storchaka (serhiy.storchaka) * (Python committer) Date: 2021-04-18 18:17
There is no issues with lists and strings. "]" clearly ends the list display, and a quote ends a string literal. The problem with numeric literals is that they can contain letters, so it is not clear (for human reader) where the numeric literals ends and the keyword starts. Adding new numeric prefixes or suffixes or new keywords can break existing code.
msg391341 - (view) Author: sco1 (sco1) Date: 2021-04-18 18:28
Makes sense, thanks!
msg391351 - (view) Author: Raymond Hettinger (rhettinger) * (Python committer) Date: 2021-04-19 03:13
I recommend just letting this be.  Aside from it allowing for a cute riddle, in the real world seems to be harmless and not worth breaking code.

There are lots of other harmless oddities such as the space-invader increment operator:

   x -=- 1

FWIW, a code reformatter such as Black will remove any weirdness.
msg391354 - (view) Author: Guido van Rossum (Guido.van.Rossum) Date: 2021-04-19 03:43
Actually I believe a real case was reported on python-dev. I think it is not clean that the boundary between numbers and identifiers is so fluid.
msg395367 - (view) Author: miss-islington (miss-islington) Date: 2021-06-08 23:31
New changeset 2ea6d890281c415e0a2f00e63526e592da8ce3d9 by Serhiy Storchaka in branch 'main':
bpo-43833: Emit warnings for numeric literals followed by keyword (GH-25466)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/2ea6d890281c415e0a2f00e63526e592da8ce3d9
msg395368 - (view) Author: miss-islington (miss-islington) Date: 2021-06-08 23:52
New changeset eeefa7f6c0cc64bc74c3b96a0ebbff1a2b9d3199 by Miss Islington (bot) in branch '3.10':
bpo-43833: Emit warnings for numeric literals followed by keyword (GH-25466)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/eeefa7f6c0cc64bc74c3b96a0ebbff1a2b9d3199
msg396498 - (view) Author: Patrick Reader (pxeger) * Date: 2021-06-24 16:17
I would like to note that syntax like this is in heavy use in the Code Golf community (a sport in which the aim is to write the shortest code possible to complete a particular task).

It will be disappointing if it becomes an error and break many past programs (you can search for phrases like `1and`, `0for` on https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/search?q=0for for examples).

I could understand if this change remains because code golf is not exactly an important thing with serious ramifications, but I think it should be taken in to consideration as a use-case nonetheless.
msg405939 - (view) Author: Guido van Rossum (gvanrossum) * (Python committer) Date: 2021-11-08 09:32
Do we have a plan for when this will be turned into a non-silent warning and when into an error?
msg405949 - (view) Author: Pablo Galindo Salgado (pablogsal) * (Python committer) Date: 2021-11-08 13:52
Unless I am missing something it should be 3.11 non-silent warning and 3.12 syntax error
History
Date User Action Args
2022-04-11 14:59:44adminsetgithub: 87999
2021-11-08 13:52:29pablogsalsetmessages: + msg405949
2021-11-08 09:32:39gvanrossumsetmessages: + msg405939
2021-06-24 16:17:36pxegersetnosy: + pxeger
messages: + msg396498
2021-06-09 00:25:00pablogsalsetstatus: open -> closed
resolution: fixed
stage: patch review -> resolved
2021-06-08 23:52:31miss-islingtonsetmessages: + msg395368
2021-06-08 23:31:20miss-islingtonsetpull_requests: + pull_request25198
2021-06-08 23:31:18miss-islingtonsetnosy: + miss-islington
messages: + msg395367
2021-04-19 03:43:26Guido.van.Rossumsetnosy: + Guido.van.Rossum
messages: + msg391354
2021-04-19 03:13:02rhettingersetnosy: + rhettinger
messages: + msg391351
2021-04-18 18:28:42sco1setmessages: + msg391341
2021-04-18 18:17:50serhiy.storchakasetmessages: + msg391340
2021-04-18 16:19:00sco1setmessages: + msg391336
2021-04-18 15:25:14serhiy.storchakasetversions: - Python 3.7, Python 3.8, Python 3.9
nosy: + gvanrossum, Joshua.Landau, steve.dower

messages: + msg391335

components: + Interpreter Core
2021-04-18 15:12:09serhiy.storchakasetkeywords: + patch
stage: patch review
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2021-04-14 09:20:12shreyanavigyansetmessages: + msg391051
2021-04-14 09:14:48Carl.Friedrich.Bolzsetmessages: + msg391050
2021-04-14 08:09:26shreyanavigyansetmessages: + msg391042
2021-04-13 20:25:20pablogsalsetmessages: + msg391003
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2021-04-13 18:27:19sco1create