Nick Coghlan wrote:
The pedagogic cost of making it even harder than it already is to convince people that bytes are not text would also need to be considered.
I think that boat was missed some time ago. If there were ever a serious intention to teach people that bytes are not text by limiting the feature set of bytes, it would have been better served by not giving bytes *any* features that assumed a particular encoding. As it is, bytes has quite a lot of features that implicitly treat it as ascii-encoded text: the literal and repr() forms, capitalize(), expandtabs(), lower(), splitlines(), swapcase(), title(), upper(), and all the is*() methods. Accepting all of that, and then saying "Oh, no, we couldn't possibly provide a format() method, because bytes are not text" seems a tad inconsistent. -- Greg