[Python-ideas] bitwise operations on bytes

[Guido van Rossum]

I think it's a very rarely used feature that is more likely to baffle
the casual reader. The question of what to do with byte strings of
unequal length is just the first issue that crops up. The (still
legitimate) question why we would support | and & but not << and >> is
another.

It's a slippery slope...

--Guido

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Georg Brandl<g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum schrieb:
>
>> 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
>> warrant the extra code.
>
> What about operations that don't require the bytes to be interpreted
> as anything else?
>
> The OP proposed
>
> bytes_a | bytes_b
>
> to mean
>
> bytes(b_a | b_b for (b_a, b_b) in zip(bytes_a, bytes_b))
>
> except that (probably) an equal length would have to be asserted.
>
> Georg
>
> --
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)