[Python-3000] PEP 3137 plan of attack

[Christian Heimes]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > The tasks I can think of are:
[...]

(Resend, the first mail didn't make it and I forgot a point)

While I was working on a patch for the renaming of bytes and str8 I
found some open issues that need to be discussed and addressed:

- Create an iterator view for PyBytes. The buffer object doesn't have a
view for iteration like bytes have with PyStringIter_Type. Guido said he
wants a view to play nice with the Sequence ABC.

- Should bytes (PyString_Type) subclass from basestring? It doesn't feel
quite right to me. I think we could remove basestring completely if
bytes doesn't subclass from it.

- Do we need a common base type for bytes and buffer like e.g. basebytes?

- The new bytes type (formally known as str8 / PyString_Type) still has
a bunch of methods from its original Python 2.x parent:

['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__doc__',
'__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__',
'__getnewargs__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__iter__',
'__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__ne__',
'__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rmod__',
'__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__str__', 'capitalize', 'center', 'count',
'decode', 'encode', 'endswith', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'index',
'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdigit', 'islower', 'isspace', 'istitle',
'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstrip', 'partition', 'replace',
'rfind', 'rindex', 'rjust', 'rpartition', 'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split',
'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title', 'translate',
'upper', 'zfill']

Should any of these methods be removed?

- PyString still excepts unicode in a lot of places and some important
parts of Python still require it. The interpreter was f... up as I
removed unicode support from functions like PyString_Size and
PyString_AsString. I'm not sure which function is causing trouble. The
error message was an exception bootstrapping error because
PyImport_ImportModule("__builtin__") failed. Should these methods still
accept unicode and convert it with the default encoding?

Christian