On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 05:16:28AM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
To be fair, the name "struct" implies a C-style structure, which _does_ have a fixed size, or at least fixed offsets for its members
Ah, the old "everyone thinks in C terms" fallacy raises its ugly head agan :-) The name doesn't imply any such thing to me, or those who haven't been raised on C. It implies the word "structure", which has no implication of being fixed-width. The docs for the struct module describes it as: struct — Interpret bytes as packed binary data which applies equally to the fixed- and variable-width case. The fact that we can sensibly talk about "fixed-width" and "variable-width" structs without confusion, shows that the concept is bigger than the C data-type. (Even if the most common use will probably remain C-style fixed-width structs.) Python is not C, and we shouldn't be limited by what C does. If we wanted C, we would use C. -- Steve