[Python-Dev] Py3k bytes type in 2.x (Re: nonlocal keyword in 2.x?) (original) (raw)

Lennart Regebro regebro at gmail.com
Thu Nov 5 21:38:32 CET 2009

2009/11/4 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:

Lennart Regebro wrote:

I also would really like to see a real port of the bytes class to 2.6, but I have a vague memory that there was some reason that wouldn't work. Not so much that it wouldn't work, but that the interfaces to support using it effectively really aren't there - lots of areas in the standard library needed to be tweaked to cope with bytes objects in 3.x.

Ah, right, that was the problem, the standard library. I knew I heard a good reason against it.

Generally speaking, the "bytes = str" trick represents a reasonable compromise as the APIs that you would pass a bytes object to in 3.x expect an 8-bit str instance in 2.x.

Yeah, the problem being that bytes and str has quite different API's. Ah well.

-- Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, Plone, Grok http://regebro.wordpress.com/ +33 661 58 14 64

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