[Python-Dev] Why can't I encode/decode base64 without importing a module?

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Apr 24 04:40:11 CEST 2013


Greg Ewing writes:

 > Web developers might grumble about the need for an extra call,
 > but they can no longer claim it would kill the performance of
 > their web server.

Of course they can.  There never was any performance measurement that
supported that claim in the first place.  I don't see how PEP 393
makes a difference to them.  The real problem for them is that
conceptually they think ASCII in byte form *is* text, and they want to
do text processing on it.  They'll use any flimsy excuse to avoid a
transform to str, because it's just unbearably ugly given their
givens.

I have sympathy for their position, I just (even today) think it's the
wrong thing for Python.  However, I've long since been overruled, and
I have no evidence to justify saying "I told you so".<wink/>


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