[Python-Dev] email package status in 3.X (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Tue Jun 22 22:32:40 CEST 2010

On 6/22/2010 9:24 AM, Michael Urman wrote:

By idempotent-when-possible, I mean tobytes(strorbytes, encoding, errors) that would pass an instance of bytes through, or encode an instance of str. And of course a tostr that performs similarly, passing str through and decoding bytes. While bytes(b'abc') will give me b'abc', neither bytes('abc') nor bytes(b'abc', 'latin-1') get me the b'abc' I want to see.

These are trivial functions; I just don't fully understand why the capability isn't baked in.

Possible reasons: They are special purpose functions easily built on the basic functions provided. Fine for a 3rd party library. Most people do not need them. Some might be mislead by them. As other have said, "Not every one-liner should be builtin".

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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