[Python-3000] Immutable bytes type and dbm modules

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

"Martin v. Löwis" writes:

 > It's always possible to treat these as if they were latin-1, but this
 > is so unnaturally hacky that I didn't think of it.

Emacs and XEmacs have both suffered (in different ways) from treating
raw bytes as ISO 8859-1.  Python is very different (among other
things, the Unicode type is already well-developed and the preferred
representation for text), but I think it's just as well that you avoid
this.  Even if it costs a little extra work.