At 08:22 AM 4/30/2006 -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:

Still, I expect that having a bunch of string-ish methods on bytes arrays would be convenient for certain types of data handling. Of course, only those methods that don't care about character types would be added, but that's a long list: startswith, endswith, index, rindex, find, rfind, split, rsplit, join, count, replace, translate.

I've often wished *lists* had startswith and endswith, and somewhat less often wished they had split or rsplit. Those seem like things that are generally applicable to sequences, not just strings or bytes.