Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com>: > On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 4:27 PM, Cameron Simpson <c...@zip.com.au> wrote: >> For sizes below 128, one byte of length. For sizes 128-16383, two bytes. And >> so on. Compact yet unbounded. > > [...] > > It's generally a lot faster to do a read(2) than a loop with any > number of read(1), and you get some kind of bound on your allocations. > Whether that's important to you or not is another question, but > certainly your chosen encoding is a good way of allowing arbitrary > integer values.
You can read a full buffer even if you have a variable-length length encoding. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list