[Python-Dev] What to do for bytes in 2.6? (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Fri Jan 18 06:30:37 CET 2008

"Guido van Rossum" <guido at python.org> wrote in message news:ca471dc20801172043l3356e04et9b8e807177230c6f at mail.gmail.com... | Is it reading text or binary data from stream blah? We can't tell. If | it's meant to be reading text, 2to3 should leave it alone. But if it's | meant to be reading binary data, 2to3 should change the string | literals to bytes literals (b"" in this case). (If it's used for both, | there's no hope.) As it stands, 2to3 hasn't a chance to decide what to | do, so it will leave it alone -- but the "translated" code will be | wrong if it was meant to be reading bytes.

It seems that the main purpose of adding bytes (as more or less a synonym for str when used as bytes) is to aid 2to3 translation. So I think I would favor it being part of a future import.

| Note that I believe that the -3 flag should not change semantics -- it | should only add warnings. Semantic changes must either be backwards | compatible or be requested explicitly with a forward import (which | 2to3 can remove).

Were you planning to make bytes a future (or forward?) import? I think making it so should satisfy Raymond's concerns. Even if whatever you eventually do is technically backwards compatible, he is suggesting that conceptually, it is not. I see some validity to that view.

tjr

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