[Python-Dev] PEP 467 (Minor API improvements for binary sequences) - any thoughts?

[Chris Barker]

On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 11:55 AM, Elias Zamaria <mikez302 at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is about some minor changes to the bytes, bytearray, and memoryview
> classes. Here is the PEP: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0467/
>


> I am waiting for this to be merged, or approved, or whatever is the next
> step. Someone on the bug tracker mentioned restarting the discussion on the
> mailing list, so that is what I'm trying to do here. Does anyone have any
> thoughts?
>

+1 all around.

One other thought:

: Addition of optimised iterator methods that produce bytes objects

Maybe it would make sense to have a "byte" type that holds a single byte.
It would be an integer that could only hold values from 0-255. Then the
regular iterator could simply return a bunch of single byte objects.

I can't say I've thought it through, but if a byte is a int with restricted
range, then it could act like an int in (almost?) every context, so there
would be no need for a separate iterator.

I also haven't thought through whether there is any real advantage to
having such a type -- but off the top of my head, making a distinction
between a bytes object that happens to be length-one and a single byte
could be handy. I sure do often wish for a character object.

-CHB

-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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