[Python-Dev] Python Language Summit EuroPython 2010 (original) (raw)

Alexander Belopolsky alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com
Sun Jul 25 19:32:58 CEST 2010

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 2:44 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote: ..

Indeed, we meant b'...{}...{}...'.format(x, y). The problem is that it can't invoke x.format() or y.format() since those will return text strings instead of bytes. A proposed solution was to try x.bformat() etc. Another proposed solution was to limit x and y to a small set of common types and hard-code their meanings (e.g. numbers, bytes, and dates).

Reaching an agreement on what to hard-code for dates may be harder than for the other common types. [1] Implementation of date.bformat will also have it's unique challenges because at the moment date.format is date.strftime and there is no locale independent strftime variant.

A simple solution would be to have date.bformat or hard-coded meaning to be just b'YYYY-MM-DD', but when it gets to datetime, I am sure users will start complaining about inability to specify RFC 3339 or other internet-standard formats.

[1] http://bugs.python.org/issue8913

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