[Python-Dev] Why does base64 return bytes?

[Greg Ewing]

Simon Cross wrote:
> If we only support one, I would prefer it to be bytes since (bytes ->
> bytes -> unicode) seems like less overhead and slightly conceptually
> clearer than (bytes -> unicode -> bytes),

Whereas bytes -> unicode, followed if needed by unicode -> bytes,
seems conceptually clearer to me. IOW, base64 is conceptually a
bytes-to-text transformation, and the usual way to represent
text in Python 3 is unicode.

-- 
Greg