Nick Coghlan, 23.05.2011 08:02:
On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 1:46 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
The question is how far to go with polymorphism, etc. I think that Nick's urlparse work gets the balance about right, and see only danger in more stringlike bytes (eg, by returning b'b' for b'bytes'[0]). OTOH, there are some changes that might be useful but seem very low-risk, such as a c'b' literal that means 98, not b'b'.
If we did go with an ord() literal, I would actually favour something more like 0'b'.
However, as Maciej pointed out off-list, adding a new literal type because calls to builtin functions have a relatively high overhead in CPython even with constant arguments probably isn't a good idea. Better to just write "ord('b')" and use PyPy to make it fast
Even CPython could optimise b'x'[0] into a constant, if people ever find this to be a bottleneck. Stefan