On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 1:37 AM, Robin Becker <ro...@reportlab.com> wrote: > I think I'm in the unix camp as well. I just think that an extra assumption > on input output isn't always helpful. In python 3 byte strings are second > class which I think is wrong; apparently pressure from influential users is > pushing to make byte strings more first class which is a good thing.
I wouldn't say they're second-class; it's more that the bytes type was considered to be more like a list of ints than like a Unicode string, and now that there are a few years' worth of real-world usage information to learn from, it's known that some more string-like operations will be extremely helpful. So now they're being added, which I agree is a good thing. Whether b"a"[0] should be b'a' or ord(b'a') is another sticking point. The Py2 str does the first, the Py3 bytes does the second. That one's a bit hard to change, but what I'm not sure of is how significant this is to new-build Py3 code. Obviously it's a barrier to porting, but is it important on its own? However, that's still not really "byte strings are second class". ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
