On 17Sep2010 23:21, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote: | On Sat, 18 Sep 2010 07:05:46 +1000 | Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au> wrote: | > As an example, I use a personal encoding for natural numbers scheme | > where values below 128 fit in one byte, 128 or more set the top bit on | > leading bytes to indicate followon bytes, so values up to 16383 fit in | > two bytes and so on arbitrarily. Compact and simple but unbounded. | | Well, you are proposing that we (Python core maintainers) live with | additional complication in one of the most central and critical parts of | the interpreter, just so that we satisfy some theoretical impulse for | "consistency". That doesn't sound reasonable. [...] | For the record, have you been hit by this problem, or do you even think | you might be hit by it in the near future? Me, no. But arbitrary _syntactic_ constraints in an otherwise flexible language grate. I was only suggesting a compactness-supporting approach, not lobbying very hard for making the devs use it. I'm +10 on removing the syntactic constraint, not on hacking the opcode definitons. Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au> DoD#743 http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/ Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as conceding. - Jon Adams <jadams@sea06f.sea06.navy.mil>