On Thu, Jul 20, 2000 at 12:03:19AM +0200, Jack Jansen wrote:

Of course, after I added the H specifier to PyArg_ParseTuple it turns out that solved ninetysomething% of my problems, but it turns out that what I really need is not an "unsigned short" converter but a "16 bit" converter, i.e. something that will happily accept anything from -32768 to 65535 without complaints. (The old "h" format, in other words).

That is too bad that the unsigned OR signed decision could not be made.

I need this because all the MacOS API modules are machine generated, both the C modules and the .py files with all the constants in it, and some header file authors use -1 to mean "16 1 bits", some use 0xffff. And I really don't want to hand-massage 40K lines of C and 6K lines of Python everytime a new MacOS release comes out....

Very fair.

And I also need such a format char for 8 bit values.

Does anyone mind if I change the H specifier to do no value checking other than making sure it fits in 16 bits, and add a B specifier for unchecked bytes?

Now I think that the best answer is to have a separate PyArg_UncheckedParseTuple() that gives you what you want Jack. Or, maybe more easily, PyArg_ParseTuple could revert to the 1.5.2 form and not do bounds checking and a new PyArg_CheckedParseTuple could do bounds checking. Actually, yes, the latter is a better idea. It would allow us to clean up the L as unsigned long rather than LONG_LONG issue if we wanted. Thereafter PyArg_CheckedParseTuple would be the preferred method if possible. Hence, PyArg_ParseTuple(): b - byte h - short i - int l - long L - LONG_LONG Pros: - This is as in 1.5.2. All the values are either not bounds checked at all or (maybe a little better) checked to be within [XXX_MIN, UXXX_MAX], i.e. in the range of the union of the signed and unsigned ranges. This will be backward compatible and only break code that had an overflow bug in it anyway. - It should make Jack happy, except that he would now have to go change all his 'H's back to 'h's. :( PyArg_CheckedParseTuple(): b - signed byte B - unsigned byte h - signed short H - unsigned short i - signed int I - unsigned int l - signed long L - unsigned long q - signed LONG_LONG Q - unsigned LONG_LONG Pros: - b,h,i,l and the capital equivs are the same as the formatters in the struct module for consistency - the use of capital for unsigned version of all the variables is intuitive (or at least straight forward and consistent) - q,Q for a 'quad' or long long is better than the current 'L' Cons: - New function may raise questions of "which do I use PyArg_ParseTuple or PyArg_CheckedParseTuple?" This is a documentation issue. - New function may require parallel maintenance in both functions. Or maybe not if one is made to use the other (efficiency prob?) - 'L' has changed meaning from one function to the other. I would propose just leaving is as is for 2.0 (unless the code breakage is okay) and then change 'L' in PyArg_ParseTuple to mean 'unsigned long' in Py3k. I can code this up after the O'Reilly conference if people (Jack, Guido, Tim, others?) think that this is a good idea. Trent -- Trent Mick TrentM@ActiveState.com