[Scott Fenton Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 07:43:13AM -0500]
On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 10:39:35AM +0100, Armin Rigo wrote:
About chr(i) vs. '%c'%i vs. '\x00\x01...\xFF'[i]: what I feel this shows is that one of these solutions must be thought as the primitive way to build a character, and the others should use it; and I definitely feel that chr() is the primitive way to build a character. Contrary to what I said in a previous e-mail I don't think that chr() should be implemented with '%c'%i. On the other hand, I guess that the strings' % operator could nicely be implemented in pure Python. It would then have to use chr() to implement the %c format code. It looks more reasonable than the other way around.
I disagree. My feeling about this is probably that everything that can be expressed as a function should be in pure python,
what do you mean by this? "everything" can always be expressed in a python function. It's a matter of time and space so could you be more specific? Anyway, I would try very hard to express all the builtins in python. And i see Thomas Heller's ctypes approach as a way to make this possible. Before coding anything in C there must be a real *need* to do so. greetings, holger