[Python-Dev] Bytes path support

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

R. David Murray writes:

 > Also, as has been discussed in this thread previously, any program that
 > deals with filenames is dealing with human readable languages, even
 > if posix itself treats the filenames as bytes.

That's a bit extreme.  I can name two interesting applications
offhand: git's object database and the Coda filesystem's containers.

It's true that for debugging purposes bytestrings representing largish
numbers are readably encoded (in hexadecimal and decimal,
respectively), but they're clearly not "human readable" in the sense
you mean.

Nevertheless, these are the applications that prove your rule.  You
don't need the power of pathlib to conveniently (for the programmer)
and efficiently handle the file structures these programs use.
os.path is plenty.