Python's native sequence slicing method calls for start with optional
stop and step. This is sometimes exactly what you want, but especially
when parsing binary files, you're gonna want start/length instead. If
start was an expression, messy.
In cppo, there's a function slyce that returns a sliced sequence using
start/length/step metrics, and this is used exclusively for slicing
sequences. Except sometimes you really want Python's start/stop...
I figure: Let's do it Python's way with the slicing syntax, but instead
of seq[start:start+length], you can use sli(): seq[sli(start,length)].
It's not currently used that way, but it now can be. :)
A holdover from DOS 8.3 filenames, files on Windows cannot end with a
dot. We append a - to such names on Windows platforms in all
operations, which should solve the problem, but we'd just duplicated
that code about a dozen times. No need, do it once and we can add
whatever filesystem rules for the host system we need to in one spot.
This one's missing a lot of the cleanups I've done to the others (it
isn't even python3), but it has the debug print statements and the
formatting is generally pretty good. I'll go through my local trees and
begin applying some fixes to this code in various repositories and we'll
see if we can't begin refactoring it completely.
