Tim Peters added the comment: @pitrou, I think usability is a lot more valuable than cross-feature "formal consistency" here. I've been extracting bit fields for decades, and always think of them in terms of "least-significant bit and number of bits". Perhaps the underlying difference is that nobody ever thinks of bit positions as being _between_ bits - instead we always think of "bit i" as being the bit with binary value 2**i. It's more of a math concept than an indexing concept.
For a bit _array_ I'd agree slicing semantics would make more sense. But Python ints have infinite width, and "index 0" is at the rightmost position (not the leftmost position - there is no leftmost position). I'd also like to avoid the nuisance of having to implement all the goofy slicing possibilities, like non-unit strides and negative strides. Not that they're "goofy" in general - they're goofy in the context of extracting bits from an integer. Again a bit array is a different kind of beast. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue19915> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
