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

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Wed Sep 19 20:12:16 CEST 2007

On 9/17/07, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> 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.

How far do you want to push the similarity? For instance, would ord() start working on length 1 byte arrays or would int() be the only way to get the integer out of the byte?

-Brett

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