[Python-Dev] Maintenance burden of str.swapcase (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Wed Sep 7 03:07:58 CEST 2011

On Wed, 7 Sep 2011 10:47:16 +1000 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

However, a big +1 for deprecation in the case of bytes and bytearray. That's nothing to do with the maintenance burden though, it's to do with the semantic confusion between binary data and ASCII-encoded text implied by the retention of methods like upper(), lower() and swapcase().

A big -1 on that. Bytes objects are often used for partly ASCII strings, not arbitrary "arrays of bytes". And making indexing of bytes objects return ints was IMHO a mistake.

Besides, if you want an array of ints, there's already array.array() with your typecode of choice. Not sure why other types should conform.

Regards

Antoine.

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