On 5/5/07, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin@v.loewis.de> wrote:
In general, I don't think it's a good idea to have literals turn into mutable objects, since literals are normally perceived as being constant.
Does that mean you want list literals to be immutable too?
lst = ['a', 'b', 'c'] lst.append('d') # raises an error?
That's not a literal, it's a display. The difference is that a literal denotes the same object every time it is executed. A display creates a new object every time it is executed. (another difference is that a display is a constructed thing which may contain runtime-computed components, unlike a literal).
So if bytes are mutable and also have source-level representation, they should be displays, not literals.
So is having mutable bytes just a matter of calling them "byte displays" instead of "byte literals" or does that also require changing something in the back end? STeVe -- I'm not *in*-sane. Indeed, I am so far *out* of sane that you appear a tiny blip on the distant coast of sanity. --- Bucky Katt, Get Fuzzy