[Python-Dev] Re: adding a bytes sequence type to Python

[Skip Montanaro]

    Guido> The string argument support may not even be necessary -- an
    Guido> alternative way to spell that would be to let s.decode() return a
    Guido> bytes object, which has the advantage of being explicit about the
    Guido> encoding; there's even a base64 encoding already!  

I'm sorry folks, but I still don't understand all this discussion overlap
between unicode/string objects (which require explicit or implicit decoding)
and bytes objects (which clearly must not).  Everyone keeps talking about
decoding stuff into bytes objects and whether or not bytes literals would be
compatible with the current source encoding.  My understanding is that bytes
objects are just that, raw sequences of bytes in the range 0x00 to 0xff,
inclusive, with no interpretation of any type.

Skip