[Python-Dev] PEP 467: Minor API improvements to bytes, bytearray, and memoryview (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Jun 7 17:56:38 EDT 2016

On 7 June 2016 at 14:33, Paul Sokolovsky <pmiscml at gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

On Tue, 07 Jun 2016 13:28:13 -0700 Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:

Minor changes: updated version numbers, add punctuation.

The current text seems to take into account Guido's last comments. Thoughts before asking for acceptance?

[] Deprecation of current "zero-initialised sequence" behaviour ------------------------------------------------------------ Currently, the bytes and bytearray constructors accept an integer argument and interpret it as meaning to create a zero-initialised sequence of the given size:: >>> bytes(3) b'\x00\x00\x00' >>> bytearray(3) bytearray(b'\x00\x00\x00') This PEP proposes to deprecate that behaviour in Python 3.6, and remove it entirely in Python 3.7. Why the desire to break applications of thousands and thousands of people?

Same argument as any deprecation: to make existing and future defects easier to find or easier to debug.

That said, this is the main part I was referring to in the other thread when I mentioned some of the constructor changes were potentially controversial and probably not worth the hassle - it's the only one with the potential to break currently working code, while the others are just a matter of choosing suitable names.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list