[Python-Dev] Bytes path support (original) (raw)

Marko Rauhamaa marko at pacujo.net
Wed Aug 20 07:52:19 CEST 2014

Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>:

With my serious hat on, I would like to claim that conceptually filenames are most definitely text. Due to various historical accidents the UNIX system calls often encoded text as arguments, and we sometimes need to control that encoding.

Due to historical accidents, text (in the Python sense) is not a first-class data type in Unix. Text, machine language, XML, Python etc are interpretations of bytes. Bytes are the first-class data type recognized by the kernel. That reality cannot be wished away.

Hence the occasional need for bytes arguments. But most of the time you don't have to think about that, and forcing users to worry about it is mostly as counter-productive as forcing to think about the encoding of every text file.

The users of Python programs can often be given higher-level facades. Unix programmers, though, shouldn't be shielded from bytes.

Marko

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