[Python-Dev] Python 3.x and bytes (original) (raw)

Eric Smith eric at trueblade.com
Wed May 18 21:10:15 CEST 2011

On 05/18/2011 12:16 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

Robert Collins writes:

> Its probably too late to change, but please don't try to argue that > its correct: the continued confusion of folk running into this is > evidence that confusion is happening. Treat that as evidence and > think about how to fix it going forward. Sorry, Rob, but you're just wrong here, and Nick is right. It's possible to improve Python 3, but not to "fix" it in this respect. The Python 3 solution is correct, the Python 2 approach is not. There's no way to avoid discontinuity and confusion here.

I don't think there's any connection between the way 2.x confused text strings and binary data (which certainly needed addressing) with the way that 3.x returns a different type for byte_str[i] than it does for byte_str[i:i+1]. I think it's the latter that's confusing to people. There's no particular requirement for different types that's needed to fix the byte/str problem.

And of course it's too late to make any change to this.

Eric.

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