[Python-3000] Immutable bytes type and dbm modules

[Nick Coghlan]

Greg Ewing wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>> Personally, I still think that converting to the latin-1 encoding is
>> probably just as good for this particular use case.
> 
> Although that's a conceptually screwy thing to do
> when your data has nothing to do with characters.

Yeah, this approach seems to run counter to the whole point of getting 
rid of the current str type: "for binary data use bytes, for text use 
Unicode, unless you need your binary data to be hashable, and then you 
decode it to gibberish Unicode via the latin-1 codec"

This would mean that the Unicode type would acquire all of the ambiquity 
currently associated with the 8-bit str type: does it contain actual 
text, or does it contain arbitrary latin-1 decoded binary data?

A separate frozenbytes type (with the bytes API instead of the string 
API) would solve the problem far more cleanly.

Easy-for-me-to-say-when-I'm-not-providing-the-code-'ly yours,
Nick.


-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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