[Python-Dev] bytes thoughts (original) (raw)

Christos Georgiou tzot at mediconsa.com
Thu Mar 16 14:08:33 CET 2006


"Greg Ewing" <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote in message news:440669B9.3000609 at canterbury.ac.nz...

Baptiste Carvello wrote: [Baptiste]

while manipulating binary data will happen mostly with bytes objects, some operations are better done with ints, like the bit manipulations with the &|~^ operators.

[Greg]

Why not just support bitwise operations directly on the bytes object?

Well, what's the result of

bytes([1,0,0])^ bytes([1,0])

? Is it bytes([0,0,0]) (à la little-endian) or is it bytes([1,1,0]) (straight conversion to base-256)? Or perhaps throw a ValueError if the sizes differ?

These details should be considered in the PEP.



More information about the Python-Dev mailing list