[Python-3000] bytes & Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Sep 18 02:45:23 CEST 2007

On 9/17/07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote: > I understand. But bytes are still in flux (see the repeated requests > for immutable bytes)

Moreover, my feeling is that immutable byte should be the default, and if you want mutable bytes you should have to ask for it. This would make bytes more symmetrical with strings, where immutability is the default, and if you want mutability you use an array.array('c') or whatever the equivalent will be in py3k. It would also help to settle the question of whether b"xyz" should be mutable -- clearly not, for symmetry with strings.

I'm considering the following option -- it would help if someone explored creating a patch to implement this, just to see the minimum amount of code that would need to change compared to 3.0a1: bytes are always immutable, and for the few places where a mutable bytes buffer would be handy, we use the array module. Then it would also make sense to make b[0] return a bytes array of length 1 instead of a small int -- bytes would be more similar to str in 2.x, albeit completely incompatible with str in terms of mixed operations.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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