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unicode encoding usablilty problem

aurora aurora00 at gmail.com
Mon Feb 21 01:20:18 EST 2005 
On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 15:01:09 +0100, Martin v. Löwis <martin at v.loewis.de>  
wrote:

> Nick Coghlan wrote:
>> Having "", u"", and r"" be immutable, while b"" was mutable would seem  
>> rather inconsistent.
>
> Yes. However, this inconsistency might be desirable. It would, of  
> course, mean that the literal cannot be a singleton. Instead, it has
> to be a display (?), similar to list or dict displays: each execution
> of the byte string literal creates a new object.
>
>> An alternative would be to have "bytestr" be the immutable type  
>> corresponding to the current str (with b"" literals producing  
>> bytestr's), while reserving the "bytes" name for a mutable byte  
>> sequence.
>
> Indeed. This maze of options has caused the process to get stuck.
> People also argue that with such an approach, we could as well
> tell users to use array.array for the mutable type. But then,
> people complain that it doesn't have all the library support that
> strings have.
>
>> The main point being, the replacement for 'str' needs to be immutable  
>> or the upgrade process is going to be a serious PITA.
>
> Somebody really needs to take this in his hands, completing the PEP,
> writing a patch, checking applications to find out what breaks.
>
> Regards,
> Martin

What is the processing of getting a PEP work out? Does the work and  
discussion carry out in the python-dev mailing list? I would be glad to  
help out especially on this particular issue.
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