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

Ron Adam rrr at ronadam.com
Tue Feb 21 18:40:37 CET 2006

Greg Ewing wrote:

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 abytesobject[i] happens to return an int.

Yes, and the above is the obvious reason why not. Not that I thought it was being considered.

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.

Yes, and a byte type isn't needed if the individual bytes are always in a bytes object. A bytes object with a single byte would be an octet in that case.

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.

I agree the bytes object shouldn't re implement arithmetic. I would like bitwise logic operations on bytes() and byte ranges() if possible.

Cheers, Ronald Adam

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