On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 05:16:28AM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
> To be fair, the name "struct" implies a C-style structure, which
> _does_ have a fixed size, or at least fixed offsets for its members
Ah, the old "everyone thinks in C terms" fallacy raises its ugly head
agan :-)
The name doesn't imply any such thing to me, or those who haven't been
raised on C. It implies the word "structure", which has no implication
of being fixed-width.
The docs for the struct module describes it as:
struct — Interpret bytes as packed binary data
which applies equally to the fixed- and variable-width case. The fact
that we can sensibly talk about "fixed-width" and "variable-width"
structs without confusion, shows that the concept is bigger than the C
data-type. (Even if the most common use will probably remain C-style
fixed-width structs.)
Python is not C, and we shouldn't be limited by what C does. If we
wanted C, we would use C.
--
Steve
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