[Python-3000] Immutable bytes -- looking for volunteer

[Brett Cannon]

On 9/17/07, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> This may have passed in a thread where no-one was listening, so I'm
> repeating it here.
>
> I'm considering the following option: bytes would always be immutable,
> and for the few places (mostly in io.py) where a mutable bytes buffer
> would be handy, we use the array module. Then it would also make sense
> to make b[0] return a bytes array of length 1 instead of a small int
> -- bytes would be more similar to str in 2.x, albeit completely
> incompatible with str in terms of mixed operations.
>

How far do you want to push the similarity?  For instance, would ord()
start working on length 1 byte arrays or would int() be the only way
to get the integer out of the byte?

-Brett