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

[Guido van Rossum]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 11:30 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> The confusion of character with byte in the original design of Python both
> privileged and burdened text processing.

Right. And it wasn't only Python: most languages created around or
before that time had the same issues (perhaps starting with C's use of
"char" meaning byte). Even most IP protocols developed in the 1990s
confuse character set and encoding (witness HTTP's "Content-type:
text/plain; charset=utf-8").

I'm glad in Python 3 we undertook to improve the distinction.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)