[Python-Dev] PEP 332 revival in coordination with pep 349? [ Was:Re: release plan for 2.5 ?] (original) (raw)

Neil Schemenauer nas at arctrix.com
Tue Feb 14 20:31:07 CET 2006

On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 08:07:49PM -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:

On 2/13/06, Neil Schemenauer <nas at arctrix.com> wrote: > "\x80".encode('latin-1')

But in 2.5 we can't change that to return a bytes object without creating HUGE incompatibilities.

People could spell it bytes(s.encode('latin-1')) in order to make it work in 2.X. That spelling would provide a way of ensuring the type of the return value.

You missed the part where I said that introducing the bytes type without a literal seems to be a good first step. A new type, even built-in, is much less drastic than a new literal (which requires lexer and parser support in addition to everything else).

Are you concerned about the implementation effort? If so, I don't think that's justified since adding a new string prefix should be pretty straightforward (relative to rest of the effort involved). Are you comfortable with the proposed syntax?

Neil

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