actually, bytes are, well, bytes ;-) -- that is, 8 bits.
Grammatically, you appear to be disagreeing with the assertion that bytes are numbers. Is that the case?
Um, yes. Though I think for the rest of the conversation, it’s a distinction that doesn’t matter.
If you want to be extremely technical, an "octet" is a group of eight bits (or eight musicians, but I haven't yet figured out how to send musicians down an ethernet cable), and a "byte" isn't as rigidly defined. But on modern PCs, you can fairly safely assume that they're synonymous.
Sure — a byte, I think, is the smallest unit of memory that can be addressed. It could be more or less that 8 bytes, but that wasn’t the point either.
I suppose you could argue that a "byte" is a patch of storage capable of holding a number from 0 to 255, as opposed to being the number itself, but that's getting rather existential :)
No, I’m making the distinction that an eight bit byte is, well, eight bits, that CAN represent a number from 0 to 255, or it can represent any other data type — like one eighth of the bits in a float, for instance. Or a bit field, or 1/2 a 16 bit int.
In Python, a "bytes" object represents a sequence of eight-bit units. When you subscript a bytes [1], you get back an integer with the value at that position.
And when you print it, you get the ascii characters corresponding to each byte.... So one element in a bytes object is no more an integer than a character....
So if a collection of them is called a "bytes" and one of them is an integer in range(0, 256), doesn't it stand to reason that a byte is a number?
We use a decimal number (and ascii) to represent the bytes, as it’s more human readable and consistent with other python types.
Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding your statement here.
Again, it doesn’t much matter, until you get to deciding how to bitshift an entire bytes object. -CHB