How to get an integer from a sequence of bytes

[Grant Edwards]

On 2013-06-03, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 02 Jun 2013 21:25:45 +0200, Mok-Kong Shen
><mok-kong.shen at t-online.de> declaimed the following in
> gmane.comp.python.general:
>
>
>> b'7' is the byte with the character 7 in a certain code, so that's
>> ok. In other PLs one assigns an int to a byte, with that int in either
>
> 	In other languages "byte" is an 8-bit signed/unsigned numeric.

That's a common assumption, but historically, a "byte" was merely the
smallest addressable unit of memory.  The size of a "byte" on widely
used used CPUs ranged from 4 bits to 60 bits.

Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

    "The size of the byte has historically been hardware
     dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the
     size."

That's why IEEE standards always use the word "octet" when referring a
value containing 8 bits.
     
Only recently has it become common to assume that an "byte" contains 8
bits.

-- 
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