[Python-ideas] Fixing the Python 3 bytes constructor

[Cory Benfield]

On 28 March 2014 10:27, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyway, what do people think? Does anyone actually *like* the way the
> bytes constructor in Python 3 currently handles integers and want to
> keep it forever?

I hate it, I'd love to see a change. It bit me when I wrote my first
Python-3-only project, and while it wasn't hard to debug it was
utterly baffling for quite a while. Writing bytes([integer]) is pretty
ugly, and it makes me sad each time I see it. I've even commented
occurrences of it to remind myself that this is really the way I meant
to do it.


> Does the above proposal sound like a reasonable
> suggestion for improvement in 3.5? Does this hit PEP territory, since
> it's changing the signature and API of a builtin?

I'd like to see it improved, even if I can't take advantage of that
improvement for quite some time. Sounds like a PEP to me.