Python in Process Control?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2004-10-01, Neil Benn <benn at cenix-bioscience.com> wrote:

> IMHO, I think that Python is not a suitable piece of software
> for industrial control as it has poor support for bytes (a
> string shouldn't be used to store bytes!)

It's incovenient, but it works.  I often end up converting the
string representation to/from a list of integers.

> and also bit twiddling is difficult (people who ask about his
> on the Python newsgroup are usually shouted at).

Bit twiddling didn't used to be difficult, but it's getting
more so. :(  Programs that used to be fine are now throwing
warnings about shift operations, hex constants, and things like
that.  

A while back, somebody wrote a pure-python fixed-length integer
class that looked like it would be handy. A C implimentation of
byte arrays would be very handy, since then you wouldn't have
to convert back and forth between strings and lists of
integers.

The combination of a C-language byte-array and C-language
fixed-length integer operations would kill.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  I feel partially
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