MRAB writes:
You said "give an immutable instance of a builtin class a mutable attribute slot". Why would the slot be mutable?
I think the idea is that in many cases you won't know what the encoding is until after you've read the bytes. But I don't really see this idea as that useful either way. The obvious use case for me would be in the email module. So you read in a message and create a bytes object, which you stash away for later use as necessary. The header and the body, each MIME part, each MIME part header and payload, and so on recursively are identified as slices of the BigBytesObject you read in at the beginning, which is implicitly a binary blob and doesn't need an encoding (strike one). Each header identifies the encoding (which here would have to refer ambiguously to Content-Type or Content-Transfer-Encoding, strike two) of the corresponding payload. And you'll need to deal with cases where Content-Type and Content-Transfer-Encoding are both relevant, strike three. You may as well keep the various layers of encoding explicitly in email-specific objects, so use case: email strikes out. That's only one use case, of course. But we can see what a use case would have to look like: you read in a bytes object, just enough to enable you to accurately parse the rest of the stream in the same way and tag each bytes part with an appropriate encoding. What are they?