As those who have to work with byte strings know, when retrieving a single character from a byte string, what you get back is not a byte string, but an int -- a rather important distinction from unicode strings (str). This has the frustrating side-effect of b'abc'[2] == b'c' being False. It is far too late to change that particular behavior of the byte string (returning int's, that is) -- however, it may not be too late for a non-backwards-incompatible change: have the bytes class' __eq__ method be modified so that it 1) checks to see if the bytes instance is length 1 2) checks to see if a) the other object is an int, and b) 0 <= other_obj < 256 3) if 1 and 2, make the comparison between the int and its single element 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. Thoughts? ~Ethan~