Greg Ewing wrote: > Travis Oliphant wrote: > > >>Part of the problem is that ctypes uses a lot of different Python types >>(that's what I mean by "multi-object" to accomplish it's goal). What >>I'm looking for is a single Python type that can be passed around and >>explains binary data. > > > It's not clear that multi-object is a bad thing in and > of itself. It makes sense conceptually -- if you have > a datatype object representing a struct, and you ask > for a description of one of its fields, which could > be another struct or array, you would expect to get > another datatype object describing that. > > Can you elaborate on what would be wrong with this? > > Also, can you clarify whether your objection is to > multi-object or multi-type. They're not the same thing -- > you could have a data structure built out of multiple > objects that are all of the same Python type, with > attributes distinguishing between struct, array, etc. > That would be single-type but multi-object.
I've tried to clarify this in another post. Basically, what I don't like about the ctypes approach is that it is multi-type (every new data-format is a Python type). In order to talk about all these Python types together, then they must all share some attribute (or else be derived from a meta-type in C with a specific function-pointer entry). I think it is simpler to think of a single Python type whose instances convey information about data-format. -Travis _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
