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

Robert Collins robertc at robertcollins.net
Thu May 19 01:39:19 CEST 2011

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 4:16 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> 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.

The top level description: 'bytes is a different type to text[unicode] and casting between them must be explicit' is completely correct in Python 3: I didn't (and have never AFAIK) quibbled about that.

Thats separate to the implementation issues I have mentioned in this thread and previous.

Arguing that implicit casting is a good idea isn't what I was doing, nor what Nick was rebutting, AFAICT.

-Rob

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