Greg Ewing wrote: > Travis Oliphant wrote: > >> The 'bit' type re-intprets the size information to be in units of "bits" >> and so implies a "bit-field" instead of another data-format. > > Hmmm, okay, but now you've got another orthogonality > problem, because you can't distinguish between e.g. > a 5-bit signed int field and a 5-bit unsigned int > field.
Good point. > > It might be better not to consider "bit" to be a > type at all, and come up with another way of indicating > that the size is in bits. Perhaps > > 'i4' # 4-byte signed int > 'i4b' # 4-bit signed int > 'u4' # 4-byte unsigned int > 'u4b' # 4-bit unsigned int > I like this. Very nice. I think that's the right way to look at it. > (Next we can have an argument about whether bit > fields should be packed MSB-to-LSB or vice versa...:-) I guess we need another flag / attribute to indicate that. The other thing that needs to be discussed at some point may be a way to indicate the floating-point format. I've basically punted on this and just meant 'f' to mean "platform float" Thus, you can't use the data-type object to pass information between two platforms that don't share a common floating point representation. -Travis _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com