[Python-Dev] RFC: PEP 460: Add bytes % args and bytes.format(args) to Python 3.5

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Benjamin Peterson writes:

 > I agree. This is a very important, much-requested feature for low-level
 > networking code.

I hear it's much-requested, but is there any description of typical
use cases?  The ones I've seen on this list and on -ideas are
typically stream-oriented, and seem like they would be perfectly
well-served in terms of code readability and algorithmic accuracy by
reading with .decode('ascii', errors='surrogateescape') and writing
with .encode() and the same parameters (or as latin1).

 > Yes, I don't think we need to support very much of the formatting
 > language cover 99.8% of formating cases for bytes.

And the other 0.02% will be continuous excuses for RFEs and gratuitous
bugs in rarely used format specs and ports from str processing to
bytes processing.