[Python-Dev] bytes thoughts

[Christos Georgiou]

"Josiah Carlson" <jcarlson at uci.edu> wrote in message
news:20060316090941.F73B.JCARLSON at uci.edu...

"Christos Georgiou" <tzot at mediconsa.com> wrote:

[Christos]
> Well, what's the result of
>
> bytes([1,0,0])^ bytes([1,0])
>
> ?  Is it bytes([0,0,0]) (à la little-endian) or is it bytes([1,1,0])
> (straight conversion to base-256)?  Or perhaps throw a ValueError if the
> sizes differ?

[Josiah]
> It's a ValueError.  If the sizes matched, it would be a per-element
> bitwise xor.

I agree ("in the face of ambiguity..."), although I understand that it 
wasn't
obvious that I do from the way I asked the question, which I was expecting
Greg to answer :)

[Christos]
> These details should be considered in the PEP.

[Josiah]
> They aren't considered because they are *obvious* to most (if not all)
> sane people who use Python.

I beg to disagree.  I don't know whether you are Dutch or not, but most of
the Python users aren't; one of the reason PEPs exist is to explain what
*should* "be obvious at first" when one is Dutch ;-)  Apart from joking,
PEPs should be a record of beating/thinking the PEP subject to its death:
"The PEP author is responsible for building consensus within the
community and documenting dissenting opinions."