[Python-Dev] Re: adding a bytes sequence type to Python (original) (raw)

Roman Suzi rnd at onego.ru
Wed Aug 18 06:30:58 CEST 2004

On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

Roman Suzi wrote:

On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

It was in the shadows because we had byte-strings. Right, so why not revive it ?! Anyway, this whole discussion about a new bytes type doesn't really solve the problem that the b'...' literal was intended for: that of having a nice way to define (read-only) 8-bit binary string literals.

I think new mutable bytes() type is better than old 8-bit binary strings for binary data processing purposes. Or do we need them for legacy text-procesing software?

We already have a number of read-write types for storing binary data, e.g. arrays, cStringIO and buffers. Inventing yet another way to spell binary data won't make life easier. >However, what will be missing is a nice way to spell read-only binary data. >Since 'tada' will return a Unicode object in Py3k, I think we should reuse the existing 8-bit string object under the new literal constructor b'tada\x00' (and apply the same source code encoding semantics we apply today for 'tada\x00'). > Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi

rnd at onego.ru == My AI powered by GNU/Linux RedHat 7.3

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list