[Python-Dev] RFC: PEP 460: Add bytes % args and bytes.format(args) to Python 3.5 (original) (raw)

Matt Billenstein matt at vazor.com
Wed Jan 8 20:22:08 CET 2014

On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 at 07:12:06PM +0100, Stefan Behnel wrote:

Why can't someone write a third-party library that does what these projects need, and that works in both Py2 and Py3, so that these projects can be modified to use that library and thus get on with their porting to Py3?

Apologies if this is out of place and slightly OT and soap-boxey...

Does it not strike anyone here how odd it is that one would need a library to manipulate binary data in a programming language with "batteries included" on a binary computer? And maybe you can do it with existing facilities in both versions of Python, although in python3, I need to understand what bytes, format, ascii, and surrogateescape mean - among other things.

I started in Python blissfully unaware of unicode - it was a different time for sure, but what I knew from C worked pretty much the same in Python - I could read some binary data out of a file, twiddle some bits, and write it back out again without any of these complexities - life was good and granted I was naive, but it made Python approachable for me and I enjoyed it. I stuck with it and learned about unicode and the complexities of encoding data and now I'm astonished at how many professional programmers don't know the slightest bit about it and how horribly munged some data you can consume on the web might be

So now I'm getting more serious about Python3 and my fear is that the development community (python3) has fractured from the user community (python2) in that they've built something that solves their problems (to oversimplify lets say a webapp) - sure, a bunch of stuff got fixed along the way and we gave the users division they would expect (3/2 == 1.5), but somewhere what I felt was more like a hobbyist language has become big and complex and "we need to protect our users from doing the wrong thing."

And I think everyone was well intentioned - and python3 covers most of the bases, but working with binary data is not only a "wire-protocol programmer's" problem. Needing a library to wrap bytesthing.format('ascii', 'surrogateescape') or some such thing makes python3 less approachable for those who haven't learned that yet - which was almost all of us at some point when we started programming.

I appreciate everyone's hard work - I'm confident the community will cross the 2-3 chasm and I hope we preserve the approachability I first came to love about Python when I started using it for all sorts of applications.

thx

m

-- Matt Billenstein matt at vazor.com http://www.vazor.com/

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