[Python-Dev] s/bytes/octet/ [Was:Re: bytes.from_hex() [Was: PEP 332 revival in coordination with pep 349?]] (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Feb 21 10:51:08 CET 2006

Ron Adam wrote:

Storing byte information as 16 or 32 bits ints could take up a rather lot of memory in some cases.

I don't quite see the point here. Inside a bytes object, they would be stored 1 byte per byte. Nobody is suggesting that they would take up more than that just because a_bytes_object[i] happens to return an int.

So the only reason to introduce a new "byte" type is to remove some of the operations that int has. We can already do bitwise operations on an int, so we don't need a new type to add that capability.

What's more, I can see this leading to people asking for arithmetic operations to be added to the byte type so they can do wrap-around arithmetic, and then for 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit etc. versions of it, etc. etc.

Do we really want to get onto that slope?

Greg

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