[Python-ideas] Adding 'bytes' as alias for 'latin_1' codec.

[Terry Reedy]

On 6/2/2011 1:37 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 3:58 AM, Ethan Furman<ethan at stoneleaf.us>  wrote:
>> A byte stream with multiple encodings?  Now *that* seems wrong!
>
> Unicode encodings are just one serialisation format specific to text
> data. bytes objects may contain *any* serialisation format (e.g. zip
> archives, Python pickles, Python marshal files, packed binary data,
> innumerable wire protocols both standard and proprietary).

One result of this thread is that I see much better the value of 
separating the ancient human level concepts of character and text from 
the (3) decades old computer concept of byte. Numbers, lists, and dicts 
are other old human concepts. As Nick implies above, bytes (or bits 
within them) are used to encode all data for computer processing.

The confusion of character with byte in the original design of Python 
both privileged and burdened text processing.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy