
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. (and, sure, the variable-length encoding wouldn't be very complicated; it would still be more complicated than it needs to be, and that's already a problem) 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? Thank you Antoine.