[Python-Dev] PEP: Adding data-type objects to Python (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Oct 31 00:43:11 CET 2006

Travis Oliphant wrote:

The 'bit' type re-intprets the size information to be in units of "bits" and so implies a "bit-field" instead of another data-format.

Hmmm, okay, but now you've got another orthogonality problem, because you can't distinguish between e.g. a 5-bit signed int field and a 5-bit unsigned int field.

It might be better not to consider "bit" to be a type at all, and come up with another way of indicating that the size is in bits. Perhaps

'i4'   # 4-byte signed int
'i4b'  # 4-bit signed int
'u4'   # 4-byte unsigned int
'u4b'  # 4-bit unsigned int

(Next we can have an argument about whether bit fields should be packed MSB-to-LSB or vice versa...:-)

-- Greg

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