[Python-ideas] bitwise operations on bytes

[Guido van Rossum]

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 10:29 PM, Facundo
Batista<facundobatista at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 6:31 PM, Guido van Rossum<guido at python.org> wrote:
>
>> In the grander scheme of things, I worry that interpreting byte
>> strings as integers and implementing bitwise operators on them is
>> going to cause more confusion and isn't generally useful enough to
>
> Indeed.  But let me rephrase this.
>
> I don't know Python, I'm just starting with Py3k, and I see a bytes
> object. I don't know what a "byte string" is  (and I even feel that
> the term is strange), but I understand that b"b3\xdd" is an array of
> three bytes, which, of course, is an array of 24 bits (unless I know
> that bytes are not always octets, but I think it's the same for this
> case).
>
> So, I think that providing bit semantics is a must for bytes objects.
>
> I don't care (or I don't know enough to know that this exist) about
> big/little endian, I just assume that this "just works" (it's is the
> same case with line ending bytes: I may not know that different OSs
> finish lines with different marks).

Sounds like a non-sequitur if anything.

>From the perspective of "I don't know Python" you cannot expect to
draw valid conclusions.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)