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

[Nick Coghlan]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 5:32 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>
>> But even as a separate type, 'ascii' still can't mix with bytes
>> safely,
>
> Yes, it can, because it's also bytes. :-)
>
> If you're using the special ascii type at all, rather
> than an ordinary str, it's precisely because you want
> to mix it with bytes. Making that part hard would
> defeat the purpose,

Indeed, the specific use case here is working with ASCII snippets
embedded within ASCII compatible encodings (or otherwise demarcated
from the 8-bit data).

As I stated elsewhere, we still need more usage of Python 3 in
production before we can find out whether or not this is a significant
enough use case to require builtin support, or if third party
libraries will be up to the task.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia