[Python-3000] PEP 3137: Immutable Bytes and Mutable Buffer (original) (raw)

Gregory P. Smith greg at krypto.org
Thu Sep 27 07:16:16 CEST 2007

On 9/26/07, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

[PEP 3137] > > Open Issue: I'm undecided on whether indexing bytes and buffer > > objects should return small ints (like the bytes type in 3.0a1, and > > like lists or array.array('B')), or bytes/buffer objects of length 1 > > (like the str type). The latter (str-like) approach will ease porting > > code from Python 2.x; but it makes it harder to extract values from a > > bytes array.

On 9/26/07, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote: > How much do you care about making the 2 -> 3 transition easy? If you > don't go the str way then comparisons like bytes[0] == b"A" won't > work unless you allow comparisons between ints and length 1 > bytes/buffers. Extracting a single item is not horrendous if you pass > it to int(). > > Personally I say go with the list-like semantics. Having the > following code return false seems odd (but not ridiculous) to me:: > > stuff = bytes([0, 1]) > stuff[1] = 42 > stuff[1] == 42 > > So unless int comparisons are allowed I am -0 on the str-like semantics. int comparisons would stick out like a sore thumb, especially since they can only be reasonably made to work on 1-byte strings. I'm still undecided (despite Marcin's eloquent argument for ints as bytes) but I'm open for votes for this case.

looks like my response in the other thread suggesting allowing comparisons of len==1 to ints was already mentioned before me. yay. I'm +0.5 on the idea of allowing the len==1 to int comparison and returning ints for the bytes/buffer indices and iteration.

glad to see this as a PEP, it feels more real. :)

-gps

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