[Python-3000] Immutable bytes -- looking for volunteer (original) (raw)

Talin talin at acm.org
Tue Sep 18 04:42:04 CEST 2007

Guido van Rossum wrote:

This may have passed in a thread where no-one was listening, so I'm repeating it here.

I'm considering the following option: bytes would always be immutable, and for the few places (mostly in io.py) where a mutable bytes buffer would be handy, we use the array module. Then it would also make sense to make b[0] return a bytes array of length 1 instead of a small int -- bytes would be more similar to str in 2.x, albeit completely incompatible with str in terms of mixed operations. It would help if someone explored creating a patch to implement this, just to see the minimum amount of code that would need to change compared to 3.0a1. (The challenge includes making all the tests pass again.)

I don't know if I mentioned this before, since (a) I didn't want to be a distraction while you were busy trying to make mutable bytes work everywhere, and (b) I didn't want to sound completely insane. However - here is my vision of how things would look in an ideal world:

Data Type AbstractSequence Immutable Mutable ========= ================ ========= ======= byte ByteSequence bytes buffer character CharSequence str strbuf

'buffer' could be an array.array, although if it's used frequently enough an optimized special-case 'buffer' class might be better. And it can have methods that array doesn't have.

-- Talin

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