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

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Wed Aug 18 10:46:55 CEST 2004

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

Skip Montanaro wrote:

My understanding is that bytes objects are just that, raw sequences of bytes in the range 0x00 to 0xff, inclusive, with no interpretation of any type. Yes, but your understanding is limited :-) This idea is good, but it falls short once we talk about source code, because source code does have an encoding. So if you don't want to incorporate the notion of encodings into the byte string types, yet be able to declare them in source code, you have to go for a numeric representation. I.e. you write bytes(71,69, 84) instead of b"GET" As soon as you use some kind of string notation for denoting byte code values, you immediately have to deal with encodings.

Of course you do, but aren't you making things too complicated, Martin ?

If you write your string literal using just ASCII characters and escapes, I don't see much of a problem with different source code encodings. If it makes you feel better, we could even enforce this by only allowing these characters in binary string literals.

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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