[Python-3000] Thoughts on new I/O library and bytecode

[Josiah Carlson]

"Jim Jewett" <jimjjewett at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 2/21/07, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> > If the spelling of a bytes string with an ASCII character value is all
> > you are complaining about, you should have said so right away.
> 
> That is my main objection.
> 
> A literal form does clear it up, though I'm not sure "b" is the right
> prefix.  (I keep wanting to read "binary" or "boolean", rather than
> "ASCII")
> 
> To be honest, it would probably be enough if there were an ascii
> builtin, or if the example uses of the bytes constructor showed
> 
>     bytes(text)   # no encoding
> 
> just copying the low-order byte, and raising exceptions if any
> high-order bytes were non-zero.

That's more or less changing the signature of bytes to be bytes(<text>,
codec='ascii'), but it breaks when faced with hex or octal escapes
greater than 127.  Making it codec='latin-1' is marginally better, but
having a default, regardless of the default, is begging for trouble
(especially when dealing with unicode).

 - Josiah