[Python-3000] characters data type

[Josiah Carlson]

Talin <talin at acm.org> wrote:

> Given that strings are going to be unicode, will there be a "characters"
> data type to go along with the "bytes" data type?

No.  The content of bytes is an 8 bit integer.

> And how is the bytes data type different from the existing array type?

Effectively, you can think of the bytes datatype as a combination of a
list and an array('B').  It is supposed to be optimized for repeated
extension, so users can presumably use += without worry.  That isn't the
case with the current array type.

Is this suffient to warrant a new replacement type?  I don't believe so,
hence my series of posts in python-dev (the most recent of which was
reposted here) in regards to immutable and mutable bytes types.

 - Josiah