[Python-ideas] Direct byte<->int conversions (was Re: bitwise operations on bytes)

[Eric Eisner]

This patch seems very complete, with only the API to hammered out.
Here is my summary of some options:

method names:
patch behavior: int.as_bytes / int.frombytes
int.as_bytes / int.from_bytes
int.asbytes / int.frombytes

Endianness:
patch behavior: default flag: little_endian=False
byteorder option accepting 'big' or 'little', this can also accept sys.byteorder

sign:
patch behavior: default flag: signed=True
maybe unsigned as the default?

byte length:
patch behavior: fixed_length=None
other names: length, bytelength


As for my own opinions: I think the method names should have
consistent underscore usage. I think it is important to have all of
big, little, and native as byteorder options, but I would be against
having native as the default. I think it is unclean for core
functionality to be platform dependent (there may be some examples of
this that I'm not thinking of though).

One option would be to have the defaults of int.as_bytes mirror the
hex builtin function, eg big endian and unsigned. This way it could be
more consistent with related functionality already in the core.

Thoughts?

-Eric

On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 20:23, Mark Dickinson<dickinsm at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Nick Coghlan<ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Bytes to int:
>>
>> [...]
>> Int to bytes:
>>
>> [...]
>
> Alexandre Vassalotti has posted a patch at
>
> http://bugs.python.org/issue1023290
>
> that implements methods very much like the ones that Nick describes.
>
> Mark
>