On 11 Sep 2014 06:30, "Chris Lasher"
Put yourself in the shoes of a beginner.
We often compromise the beginner experience for backwards compatibility reasons, or to provide a better developer experience in the long run (cf. changing print from a statement to a builtin function). In this case, I *agree* the current behaviour is confusing, since it recreates some of the old "is it binary or is it text?" confusion that was more endemic in Python 2. In Python 3, "bytes" is still a hybrid type that can hold: * arbitrary binary data * binary data that contains ASCII segments A pure teaching language wouldn't make that compromise. Python 3 isn't a pure teaching language though - it's a pragmatic professional programming language that is *also* useful for teaching. The problem is that for a lot of data it is *genuinely ambiguous* as to which of those it actually is (and it may change at runtime depending on the specific nature of the data). Both the default repr and the literal form assume the "binary data ASCII compatible segments", which aligns with the behaviour of the Python 2 str type. That isn't going to change in Python, especially since we actually *did* try it for a while (prior to the 3.0 release) and really didn't like it. However, as others have noted, making it easier to get a pure hex representation is likely worth doing. There are lots of ways of doing that currently, but none that really qualify as "obvious". Cheers, Nick.