On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 12:39 PM, Steve Holden <steve@holdenweb.com> wrote:

I think the chances of a "byte" object are about as good as the chances of a character object

probably right.

(though one can always implement such in C extensions, that wouldn't build them into the syntax).

I think you could simply subclass, too (overriding __new__ and a couple methods). But that would do exactly no good, unless you used your own custom string and bytes objects, too. The whole point is that iterating over a string (Or bytes) always returns an also-iterable object, ad-infinitum.

This is the cause of the major remaining common "type error" in Python. (the old integer division used to be the big one)

The fact that characters are single-byte strings is responsible for certain anomalies with (e.g.) the __contains__ operator (list elements aren't lists, but string element are strings), but overall the choices made lead to sensible, comprehensible code.

I'm pretty convinced that the choice not to have a character type has had basically zero benefits to sensible, comprehensible code, though it's not a very big deal, either. not a big enough deal for the churn it would cause to introduce it now, that's for sure.

so +1 for this PEP as is.

-CHB

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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