[Python-3000] PEP 3137: Immutable Bytes and Mutable Buffer

[Georg Brandl]

Alexandre Vassalotti schrieb:

>> Indexing
>> --------
>>
>> **Open Issue:** I'm undecided on whether indexing bytes and buffer
>> objects should return small ints (like the bytes type in 3.0a1, and
>> like lists or array.array('B')), or bytes/buffer objects of length 1
>> (like the str type).  The latter (str-like) approach will ease porting
>> code from Python 2.x; but it makes it harder to extract values from a
>> bytes array.
> 
> I think indexing a bytes/buffer object should return an int. I find
> this behavior
> more natural, to me, than using an ord()-like function to extract
> values. In fact, I
> remarked that the use of ord() is good indicator that bytes should be used
> instead of str (look by yourself: grep -R --include='*.py' 'ord(' python25/Lib).

If b[0] returns an int, you will have to use ord() to compare it to b"a".
If it returns b"a", you won't.

If you want to compare a byte by ordinal, you can still use b"\xAB", without
a function call...

Therefore I vote for returning not an int, but I wouldn't object to bytes of
length 1 being comparable to ints.

Georg


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