Efficient Bit addressing in Python.

[Hendrik van Rooyen]

"Tino Wildenhain"  wrote:


> 
> byte1 byte2? this does not look very practical
> to me. In the simplest form of storing
> your values in a text string, you could just
> use ord() to get the byte value and
> operate on it with 1<<0 1<<1 1<<3 and so on.
> 
> If you want, put a module in which defines the
> constants
> 
> bit1=1<<0
> bit2=1<<1
> 
> and so on and use it via
> if byte & bit1: ...

This is what I meant by "jumping through hoops".

> 
> more efficiently for operations on really big
> bit strings is probably just using integers.

Sure, one could for instance make a list of eight-entry lists:

io = [[b0,b1,b2,b3,b4,b5,b6,b7],    ]

Then the hoop jumping goes in the opposite
direction - to get hold of an actual byte, you
have to rotate the bits into some byte one at a
time.
This approach has the advantage that you can
add a ninth "dirty" bit to indicate that the "byte" 
in question needs to be written out.

Is there not some OO way of hiding this
bit banging complexity?

Using getters and setters? - I tend to go "tilt" 
like a cheap slot machine when I read that stuff.

- Hendrik

--
Reality is the bane of the sane