If you've ever written code to convert an integer into a string of decimal digits, you may have come to the conclusion that the integer 0 should map not to the string 0, but to the empty string instead. Most algorithms I've seen need to introduce a kludge to make 0 come out right. After all, when we write 0 we are violating the usual rule of "no leading zeros".
A nice, natural recursive expression of the conversion process is
def itoa(n):
if n==0: return ""
return itoa(n/10) + chr(ord('0') + n%10)
which can be thought of as
The string representation of an integer consists of its leading digits (n/10) followed by its last digit (n%d).n%10).
Trying to fix this by returning "0" instead of "" would result in everything getting a superfluous leading zero.
On the other hand writing 0 as the empty string would be rather annoying.
