>> actually, bytes are, well, bytes ;-) -- that is, 8 bits. > > Grammatically, you appear to be disagreeing with the assertion that > bytes are numbers. Is that the case?
Um, yes. Though I think for the rest of the conversation, it’s a distinction that doesn’t matter. > If you want to be extremely technical, an "octet" is a group of eight > bits (or eight musicians, but I haven't yet figured out how to send > musicians down an ethernet cable), and a "byte" isn't as rigidly > defined. But on modern PCs, you can fairly safely assume that they're > synonymous. Sure — a byte, I think, is the smallest unit of memory that can be addressed. It could be more or less that 8 bytes, but that wasn’t the point either. > I suppose you could argue that a "byte" is a patch of > storage capable of holding a number from 0 to 255, as opposed to being > the number itself, but that's getting rather existential :) No, I’m making the distinction that an eight bit byte is, well, eight bits, that CAN represent a number from 0 to 255, or it can represent any other data type — like one eighth of the bits in a float, for instance. Or a bit field, or 1/2 a 16 bit int. > In Python, a "bytes" object represents a sequence of eight-bit units. > When you subscript a bytes [1], you get back an integer with the value > at that position. And when you print it, you get the ascii characters corresponding to each byte.... So one element in a bytes object is no more an integer than a character.... > So if a collection of them is called a "bytes" and > one of them is an integer in range(0, 256), doesn't it stand to reason > that a byte is a number? We use a decimal number (and ascii) to represent the bytes, as it’s more human readable and consistent with other python types. > Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding your statement here. Again, it doesn’t much matter, until you get to deciding how to bitshift an entire bytes object. -CHB _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
