[Python-Dev] Unifying Long Integers and Integers: baseint (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Thu Aug 12 07:10:44 CEST 2004

Guido van Rossum wrote:

Do we really need byte array literals at all? I don't expect there to be much of a demand.

I'm not so sure. For example, in httplib, in the line

h.putrequest('GET', selector)

I would claim that 'GET' is a byte string, not a character string: it is sent as-is onto the wire, which is a byte-oriented wire.

Now, it would also "work" if it were a character string, which then gets converted to a byte string using the system default encoding - but I believe that an application that relies on the system default encoding is somewhat broken: Explicit is better than implicit.

Rather, byte arrays would eventually be returned by the read() method when a file is opened in binary mode. (Isn't this roughly how Java does this?)

Java also supports byte arrays in the source, although they are difficult to type:

byte[] request = {'G', 'E', 'T'};

As for reading from streams: Java has multiple reader APIs; some return byte strings, some character strings.

Regards, Martin

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