[Python-Dev] idea for data-type (data-format) PEP

[Alexander Belopolsky]

Martin v. Löwis <martin <at> v.loewis.de> writes:

> 
> I'm afraid of "dead" specifications, things whose only motivation is
> that they look nice. They are just clutter. There are a few examples
> of this already in Python, like the character buffer interface or
> the multi-segment buffers.
> 

Multi-segment buffers are only dead because standard library modules
do not support them.  I often work with text data that is represented
as an array of strings.  I would love to implement a multi-segment
buffer interface on top of that data and be able to do a full text
regular expression search without having to concatenate into one big
string, but python's re module would not take a multi-segment buffer.