[Python-Dev] Re: adding a bytes sequence type to Python (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Mon Aug 23 23:56:37 CEST 2004

Guido van Rossum wrote:

Ok, so I suppose that we can learn from Jython and IronPython in this respect...

How do they handle binary data and the interfacing between various I/O facilities, e.g. files, sockets, pipes, user input, etc. I'm not sure, but I expect that in most cases they use Unicode strings in order to be compatibly with Python's standard library. That's not the outcome I'd like to see though. I believe Jython at least also has a bytes-like type (probably a thin wrapper around Java's byte array) that's used for interfacing to java classes.

I've had a discussion with Jack Janssen about using bytes as default return value for I/O operations where no encoding is specified (or unknown).

He raised the issue of bytes not being usable as dictionary keys due to their mutability. He was also concerned about the increase in complexity when writing programs that work with non-text data or mixed text/data I/O.

If we want to make the move from Python 2.x to 3.0 feasable for large code bases, then we have to do something about these issues. It seems that the simple solution of going with Unicode

Anyway, we still have 4-5 years to think about this :-)

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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