Newbie completely confused

[John Machin]

On Sep 25, 1:51 am, Jeroen Hegeman <jeroen.hege... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Your code does NOT include any statements that could have produced the
> > above line of output -- IOW, you have not posted the code that you
> > actually ran.
>
> Oh my, I must have cleaned it up a bit too much, hoping that people
> would focus on the issue instead of the formatting of the output
> strings! Did you miss your morning coffee???

The difference was not a formatting difference; it was complete
absence of a statement, raising the question of what other non-obvious
differences there might be.

You miss the point: if it is obvious that the posted code did not
produce the posted output (common when newbies are thrashing around
trying to solve a problem), some of the audience may not bother trying
to help with the main issue -- they may attempt to help with side
issues (as I did with the fugly code bloat) or just ignore you
altogether.

>
> > Your code is already needlessly monstrously large.
>
> Which I realised and apologised for beforehand.

An apology does not change the fact that the code was needlesly large
(AND needed careful post-linefolding reformatting just to make it
runnable) and so some may not have bothered to read it.

>
> > And Python 2.5.1 does what? Strike 3.
>
> Hmm, I must have missed where it said that you can only ask for help
> if you're using the latest version...

You missed the point again: that your problem may be fixed in a later
version.

> In case you're wondering, 2.5.1
> is not _really_ that wide-spread as most of the older versions.

I wasn't wondering. I know. I maintain a package (xlrd) which works on
Python 2.5 all the way back to 2.1. It occasionally has possibly
similar "second iteration goes funny" issues (e.g. when reading 120MB
Excel spreadsheet files one after the other). You mention that
removing some attributes from a class may make your code stop
exhibiting cliff-face behaviour. If you can produce two versions of
your code that actually demonstrate the abrupt change, I'd be quite
interested in digging into it, to our possible mutual benefit.

> > For handling the bit extraction stuff, either
> [snip]
> > (b) do a loop over the bit positions
>
> Now that sounds more useful. I'll give that a try.
>

I'm glad you found something possibly more useful in my posting :-)

Cheers,
John