Ethan Furman wrote:
Greg Ewing wrote:
As for
--> some_other_var[3] == b'd'
there ought to be a literal for specifying an integer using an ascii character, so you could say something like
if some_other_var[3] == c'd':
which would be equivalent to
if some_other_var[3] == ord(b'd')
but without the overhead of computing the value each time at run time.
Given that we can't change the behavior of b'abc'[1], that would be better than what we have.
+1
Here's another thought, that perhaps is not backwards-incompatible... some_var[3] == b'd' At some point, the bytes class' __eq__ will be called -- is there a reason why we cannot have 1) a check to see if the bytes instance is length 1 2) a check to see if i) the other object is an int, and 2) 0 <= other_obj < 256 3) if 1 and 2, make the comparison instead of returning NotImplemented? This makes sense to me -- after all, the bytes class is an array of ints in range(256); it is a special case, but doesn't feel any more special than passing an int into bytes() giving a string of that many null bytes; and it would get rid of the, in my opinion ugly, idiom of some_var[i:i+1] == b'd' It would also not require a new literal syntax. ~Ethan~