PCS Bit Encoding

Just some interesting code that I found in PCS. As far as I can tell, the bits of code are the exact same, except for the "shift" field, which is not even used in the scope of the conditional.

            # These two bits of code are the same.
            elif fieldBR > byteBR:
                print "Cannot fit field into current byte"
                shift = fieldBR - byteBR
                mask = 2 ** byteBR - 1
                value = (ord(bytes[curr]) & mask)
                fieldBR -= byteBR
                byteBR = 8
                curr += 1 # next byte
            elif fieldBR == byteBR:
                mask = 2 ** byteBR - 1
                value = ord(bytes[curr]) & mask
                fieldBR -= byteBR
                byteBR = 8
                curr += 1 # next byte
            real_value += value << fieldBR

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