[Python-Dev] byte literals unnecessary [Was: PEP 332 revival in coordination with pep 349?] (original) (raw)

Neil Schemenauer nas at arctrix.com
Wed Feb 15 00:38:33 CET 2006

On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 03:13:37PM -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:

Also, bytes objects are (in my mind anyway) mutable. We have no other literal notation for mutable objects. What would the following code print?

for i in range(2): b = b"abc" print b b[0] = ord("A") Would the second output line print abc or Abc? I guess the only answer that makes sense is that it should print abc both times; but that means that b"abc" must be internally implemented by creating a new bytes object each time. Perhaps the implementation effort isn't so minimal after all...

I agree. I was thinking that bytes() would be immutable and therefore very similar to the current str object. You've convinced me that a literal representation is not needed. Thanks for clarifying your position.

(PS why is there a reply-to in your email the excludes you from the list of recipients but includes me?)

Maybe you should ask your coworkers. :-) I think gmail is trying to do something intelligent with the Mail-Followup-To header.

Neil

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