Configuration parsing: "digits + underline" should be considered as a string

[Jarvis73]

When parsing configurations (such as name=123_456), maybe the digits + underline should be considered as a string? Now the underline will be ignored and the remaining digits are treated as an integer.

Example (main.py):

from sacred import Experiment

ex = Experiment("Exp")

@ex.config
def config():
    name = "abc"

@ex.automain
def main(_config):
    print(_config['name'], type(_config['name']))

• For python main.py, we get abc <class 'str'>.
• For python main.py with name=123_456, we get 123456 <class 'int'>, which is quite wired.

A simple solution is to run the script with python main.py with name='"123_456"', but the command is a little messy and not intuitive.

[thequilo]

Hi @Jarvis73!

Sacred treats the arguments of configuration values as python literals (and treats everything it can't handle as a string), and what you see is actually just the way that python interprets numbers. I actually like the idea to just treat everything as python literal because it seems intuitive (to me, at least). But, I agree that we can come up with weird things:

• For python main.py with name=0xdeef, we get 57071 <class 'int'>
• For python main.py with name=1j, we get a TypeError (because JSON apparently can't serialize complex numbers?)
• For python main.py with name=1e-1, we get 0.1 <class 'float'>. Obvious, but I really wouldn't expect that when seeing name=1e-1
• python main.py with name=['a'] we get [a] <class 'str'>, and
• For python main.py with name=["'a'"], we get ['a'] <class 'sacred.config.custom_containers.ReadOnlyList'>

This list could probably go on for a while, and after writing it down, I start to feel that it is actually not that intuitive. But, this list also shows that if we start to have exceptions to the "treat it as a literal" rule, we'll end up with many of them.

[Jarvis73]

Hi @thequilo!

Thanks for the detailed explanation. Now I can understand the design purpose, and maybe it is more reasonable, in spite that we have to use '"xxx"' in some cases.