[Python-Dev] bytes-like objects

[R. David Murray]

Over the past while we've been cleaning up the docs in the area of "how
do we refer to bytes, bytearray, memoryview, etc, etc?" in the APIs that
deal with bytes.  As you may or may not remember, we settled on the term
'bytes-like object', and have changed the docs to (we hope) consistently
use this term, which has a glossary entry most of the references to it
link to.

I just committed (to 3.5) the final changes for issue 16518, the change
to consistently using the term 'bytes-like object' for things that
support the buffer interface.  This means that messages that previously
read:

    'sometype' does not support the buffer interface

now read

    a bytes-like object is required, not 'sometype'

The 'buffer interface' messages were rather confusing, since you have to
dig to find out what the 'buffer interface' is.  It isn't any sort of
python object, nor is there any object in python3 that has a name
related to it.  'bytes-like object', on the other hand, is fairly
intuitive[*], and if you look it up in the glossary it links to the
explanation of the buffer interface.

We felt it was worth explicitly mentioning this patch on python-dev to point
out to everyone that the docs and error messages now use a consistent
terminology, instead of the mis-mash we had before, which should make it easier
to help people with issues where this comes up.

If there are objections to this change to the messages it is easy enough to
back out, but personally I find the new error messages *much* clearer, and I'm
an experienced dev.

(This work was done by Ezio Melotti, but I committed the final patch as
part of my quest to clear the 'commit review' queue in the tracker.)

--David

[*] the more esoteric cases are not often encountered in regular (as opposed to
NumPy) code, and when they are, the extension to "something that can be
interpreted as a sequence of bytes" is pretty straightforward conceptually.