[Python-Dev] PEP 460 reboot (original) (raw)

Ethan Furman ethan at stoneleaf.us
Mon Jan 13 01:28:43 CET 2014

On 01/12/2014 03:55 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

There's a lot of discussion about PEP 460 and I haven't read it all. Maybe you all have already reached the same conclusion that I have.

No, no agreement has been reached. Your contribution is timely.

PEP 460 itself currently rejects support for %d, AFAIK on the basis that bytes aren't necessarily ASCII. I think that's a misunderstanding of the intention of the bytes type.

[...] this does not mean the bytes type isn't allowed to have a noticeable bias in favor of encodings that are ASCII supersets, even if not all bytes objects contain such data [...]

IMO it's totally fine and consistent if b'%d' % 42 returns b'42' and also for b'{}'.format(42) to return b'42' [...]

- byte literals: b'abc' (it's a syntax error to have a non-ASCII character here) - the upper() and lower() methods modify the ASCII letter positions - int(b'42') == 42, float(b'3.14') == 3.14

So if we allow the numeric modifiers [1], the only remaining question is do we allow %c and %s, and if so how do they behave?

Guido?

-- Ethan

[1] modifiers is not the right word for %i, %x, etc, is it? What is the correct term?

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