Ian Bicking writes:
I'm proposing these specials would be used in polymorphic functions, like the functions in urllib.parse. I would not personally use them in my own code (unless of course I was writing my own polymorphic functions).
This also makes it less important that the objects be a full stand-in for text, as their use should be isolated to specific functions, they aren't objects that should be passed around much. So you can easily identify and quickly detect if you use unsupported operations on those text-like objects.
OK. That sounds reasonable to me, but I don't see any need for a builtin type for it. Inclusion in the stdlib is not quite a no-brainer, but given Guido's endorsement of polymorphism, I can't bring myself to go lower than +0.9 <wink>.
(This is all a very different use case from bytes+encoding, I think)
Very much so.