[Python-ideas] a new bytestring type?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ethan Furman writes:

 > How many would be interested in having a 'bytestring'?

-1.  It's an attractive nuisance.

 > What do you see as the distinguishing characteristics?

Its main attraction is that it allows people who in practice only ever
deal with one non-Unicode encoding to ignore the fact that their data
is in fact encoded, and that their applications are very likely not
robust to data encoded differently.

While I sympathize with their problem to some extent (especially
people who are writing low-level web services), I don't think you'd
ever again be able to trust a 3rd- party module in a web context
without doing a thorough audit to ensure that all uses of
'bytestrings' are appropriate in themselves and appropriately guarded
against leaking garbage into other contexts.  Thus, "attractive
nuisance."