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[Python-Dev] Re: adding a bytes sequence type to Python

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Wed Aug 18 10:49:52 CEST 2004 
Roman Suzi wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> 
> 
>>Roman Suzi wrote:
>>
>>>On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> 
> 
>>>It was in the shadows because we had byte-strings.
>>
>>Right, so why not revive it ?!
>>
>>Anyway, this whole discussion about a new bytes type doesn't
>>really solve the problem that the b'...' literal was
>>intended for: that of having a nice way to define (read-only)
>>8-bit binary string literals.
> 
> I think new _mutable_ bytes() type is better than old 8-bit binary strings
> for binary data processing purposes.
> Or do we need them for legacy text-procesing software?

Hmm, who ever said that we are going to drop the current 8-bit
string implementation ?

I'm only suggesting to look at what's there instead of
trying to redo everything in slightly different way, e.g.
you can already get the bytes() functionality from
buffer type at C level - it's just that this functionality
is not exposed at Python level.

>>We already have a number of read-write types for storing binary
>>data, e.g. arrays, cStringIO and buffers. Inventing yet another
>>way to spell binary data won't make life easier.
>>
>>However, what will be missing is a nice way to spell read-only
>>binary data.
>>
>>Since 'tada' will return a Unicode object in Py3k, I think we
>>should reuse the existing 8-bit string object under the new
>>literal constructor b'tada\x00' (and apply the same source code
>>encoding semantics we apply today for 'tada\x00').

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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