[Python-3000] struni and the Apple four-character-codes (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Thu Jul 26 04:07:55 CEST 2007

Jeffrey Yasskin wrote:

Apple, around the dawn of time, decided that C constants like 'TEXT' (yes, those are single quotes) would compile to the uint32t 0x54455854

They weren't C constants originally, they were Pascal constants, and it made sense at the time given the way the Pascal compiler they were using handled string literals. They also worked okay as multi-character char literals in the early C compilers used on the Mac. It's unfortunate that gcc gets persnickety about those.

I initially thought that 'bytes' was the appropriate type. Unfortunately, bytes is mutable, and I think it makes sense to hash these constants (and some code in aepack.py does).

Is this another indication that we should have an immutable version of the bytes type?

-- Greg

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