[Python-ideas] Fixing the Python 3 bytes constructor

[Philipp A.]

2014-03-28 18:17 GMT+01:00 Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>:


> On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 10:06 AM, Benjamin Peterson <benjamin at python.org>wrote:
>
>> I agree. We would add a method that iterates over single bytes as bytes
>> objects instead of integers.
>>
>
> Now that's making sense.
>
even if some people don’t like it, the iterating over bytes objects makes
perfect sense.

in every statically typed language, a byte is most commonly repesented as
an integer in the range [0,255].

the annoyance has two sources:

   1.

   python 2 byte strings (aka “native strings”) behaved like that (and
   unicode strings behave like that because python has no char type)
    2.

   byte strings are represented like strings, including ascii-compatible
   parts as if they were ASCII text.

therefore, paople think single bytes would be something akin to chars
instead of simply integers from 0 to 255.

b'a'[0] == 97 looks strange, but let’s not forget that it’s actually b'\x61'[0]
== 0x61
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