[Python-Dev] email package status in 3.X

[P.J. Eby]

At 01:36 PM 6/21/2010 -0400, Terry Reedy wrote:
>On 6/21/2010 11:43 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>
>>This is probably a stupid idea, and if so I'll plead Monday morning mindfuzz
>>for it.
>>
>>Would it make sense to have "encoding-carrying" bytes and str types?
>
>On 2009-11-5 I posted 'Add encoding attribute to bytes' to 
>python-ideas. It was shot down at the time.

AFAICT, that's mainly for lack of apparent use cases, and also for 
confusion.  Here, the use case (restoring the polymorphy of stdlib 
APIs) is pretty clear.

However, if we had the string equivalent of a coercion protocol (that 
core strings and bytes would co-operate with), then it would enable 
people to write their own versions of either your idea or Barry's 
idea (or other things altogether), and still get the stdlib to play along.

Personally, I think ebytes() would do the trick and it'd be nice to 
see it in stdlib, but gaining a string coercion protocol instead 
might not be a bad tradeoff.  ;-)