On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 5:42 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote: .. > I don't see why the language spec should limit the wealth of number > formats supported by float(). > The Language Spec (whatever it is) should not, but hopefully the Library Reference should. If you follow http://docs.python.org/dev/py3k/library/functions.html#float link and the references therein, you'll end up with digit ::= "0"..."9" http://docs.python.org/dev/py3k/reference/lexical_analysis.html#grammar-token-digit