nick coghlan uytankmfgmailcom greg ewing wrote terry reedy wrote purpose type constructors construct instances reasonable inputs think number constructors accept bytes bytes input number constructor mean though people seem assuming interpreted asciiencoded characters equally plausible interpretation might binary representation number difference hardware control protocols makes sense treat sequences bytes also contain numbers ascii digits need processed also case permitted characters passing string numeric constructor ascii subset binary representations already struct module handle parsing byte sequences embedded ascii digits reasonably common practice use strings along respective type constructors however mark found another problem attempted speed py3k version decimal storing mantissa bytes object instead unicode string currently efficient way serialise number byte sequence storing mantissa bytes object actually currently slower storing string convert number string store bytes object still leaves us problem decimal 25 slower 30 26 due fact unicodeint conversion much slower corresponding 2x strint conversion ugly problem p cheers nick nick coghlan uytankmfgmailcom brisbane australia httpwwwboredomandlazinessorg _______________________________________________ pythondev mailing list zvlllneumpythonorg httpmailpythonorgmailmanlistinfopythondev unsubscribe httpmailpythonorgmailmanoptionspythondevpythondev40tangomucom thu 07 aug 2008 095718 1000 pythondev decimalunicode