[Distutils] [Python-3000] sizeof(size_t) < sizeof(long)

[Greg Ewing]

David Cournapeau wrote:

> I ask for "256 Mo", Mo for Mega-octet: French (and most non English 
> languages I am aware of) does not have this ambiguity :)

But would you ask for it that way in an English-speaking
country? Would they have a clue what you were talking
about?

Anyway, I don't think it really is an ambiguity in
practice -- only in the minds of those that have too
much time to read standards documents.

> And anyway, in 
> a computer store, you find memory for personal computers, where one byte 
> always has 8 bits.

Does it? Or...

> Going against the C standard seems pretty futile to me.

Hmmm. So as long as I program my computer in C, it has 8 bit
bytes... or at least a C implementation with 8-bit chars.
But if I use a special Unicode-C with 16-bit chars, I've
then got half as many bytes of memory as I had before...

So I have to tell the guy in the computer shop what
programming language and implementation I'm using, too! :-)

Seems to me that disregarding this particular quirk of the
C standard is a lesser evil than confusing everybody by
changing the meaning of byte all the time.

[In attempt to pull this very slightly closer to being
on-topic... what does this imply for the Python bytes
type? Are they always 8-bit bytes, or are they whatever
size your C compiler thinks bytes are? Do the Python
docs need to clarify this?]

-- 
Greg