Chris Angelico wrote:
Maybe what Python needs is an "ascii" type that's a subclass of both str and bytes, and requires that the contents be <0x80. It is text, so it can be combined with text strings; but it is also bytes, so when you combine it with bytes strings, it'll behave as most people expect.
That would be asking for trouble, I think. It would be letting back in a bit of the text/bytes confusion that Python 3 worked hard to get rid of. What happens if the bytes that you combine it with aren't in an ascii-compatible encoding? Nothing would detect that error. The only thing you might gain is a bit of efficiency by removing some encoding/decoding operations. But since the FSR, these are pretty cheap anyway when the characters are all ascii. They could maybe be made a bit cheaper still by arranging some way for a bytes object and an ascii-only str object to share underlying storage. -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
