[Python-Dev] bytes.from_hex() (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Wed Feb 22 20:32:30 CET 2006

"Greg Ewing" <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote in message news:43FC4C8B.6080300 at canterbury.ac.nz...

Efficiency is an implementation concern.

It is also a user concern, especially if inefficiency overruns memory limits.

In Py3k, strings which contain only ascii or latin-1 might be stored as 1 byte per character, in which case this would not be an issue.

If 'might' becomes 'will', I and I suspect others will be happier with the change. And I would be happy if the choice of physical storage was pretty much handled behind the scenes, as with the direction int/long unification is going.

Which is why I think that only unicode codings should be available through the .encode and .decode interface. Or alternatively there should be something more explicit like .unicodeencode and .unicodedecode that is thus restricted.

I prefer the shorter names and using recode, for instance, for bytes to bytes.

Terry Jan Reedy

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