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

Thomas Heller theller at ctypes.org
Fri Jan 18 08:24:21 CET 2008

Guido van Rossum schrieb:

I believe the issue of whether and how to backport bytes (and bytearray?) from 3.0 to 2.6 has come up before, but I don't think we've come to any kind of conclusion. It's quite subtle. In a private email, Thomas Wouters and I discussed this:

[Guido] > Perhaps the biggest question in my mind is what to do with bytes in > 2.6. Make it an alias for str? Or a new type that doesn't mix with > either str or unicode? But then how do we get read() calls and the > like on binary files or sockets to return bytes instances? Perhaps a > trivial str subclass? Or return bytes when -3 is specified? I need to > bring this up on the list. [Thomas] I don't know yet. I'm not sure yet what to do with strings and unicode in 2.6 in -3 mode (or perhaps through a future-import, with some hackery.) Perhaps a set of str-subclasses makes sense: a will-be-unicode subclass, and a will-be-bytes subclass. String literals and text-mode input would produce will-be-unicode, binary input and byte literals will-be-bytes. Switching between -3 and normal mode for that would be changing a few pointers in the core, making all operations return normal strings in normal mode. And the would-be types can produce whatever warning they wish -- they need not worry about speed. But I'm not sure if that'll work.

Is the bytes type required for PEP3118 'Revising the buffer protocol'? I just started to work on implementing this PEP for ctypes, in the hope that these changes can be merged into trunk.

Thomas

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