[Python-Dev] Unifying Long Integers and Integers: baseint

[Guido van Rossum]

>     1. Make bytes a synonuym for str.

Hmm...  I worry that a simple alias would just encourage confused
usage, since the compiler won't check.  I'd rather see bytes an alias
for a bytes array as defined by the array module.

>     2. Warn about the use of bytes as a variable name.

Is this really needed?  Builtins don't byte variable names.

>     3. Introduce b"..." literals as a synonym for current string
>        literals, and have them *not* generate warnings if non-ascii
>        characters were used in them without a coding cookie.

I expecet all sorts of problems with that, such as what it would mean
if Unicode or multibyte characters are used in the source.

Do we really need byte array literals at all?  I don't expect there to
be much of a demand.  Rather, byte arrays would eventually be returned
by the read() method when a file is opened in binary mode.  (Isn't
this roughly how Java does this?)  We could start doing this
relatively soon if we used a new mode character ("B" anyone?).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)