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

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Thu Mar 16 18:13:29 CET 2006

"Christos Georgiou" <tzot at mediconsa.com> wrote:

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?

It's a ValueError. If the sizes matched, it would be a per-element bitwise xor.

These details should be considered in the PEP.

They aren't considered because they are obvious to most (if not all) sane people who use Python. Think of future bytes behavior to be similar to current array behavior, with a few bits and pieces added to make life easier (like all of the current string methods, etc.)

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