[Python-ideas] Stop displaying elements of bytes objects as printable ASCII characters in CPython 3

[Nick Coghlan]

On 10 September 2014 17:36, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> On 10.09.2014 09:04, Chris Lasher wrote:
>> Why did the CPython core developers decide to force the display of
>> ASCII characters in the printable representation of bytes objects in
>> CPython 3?
>
> This wasn't forced. It's a simple consequence of turning the Python 2
> 8-bit string type into the Python 3 bytes type while keeping breakage
> to a pain level which doesn't have Python users skip Python 3 entirely ;-)

I believe you may be forgetting the pre-release period where there
wasn't an immutable bytes types at all. It wasn't until PEP 3137 [1]
was implemented that we got to the status quo for Python 3.

Cheers,
Nick.

P.S. I haven't forgotten my promise to try to put together a recipe
for a cleaner wrapper around "memoryview(data).cast('c')", but it may
be a while before I get back to the idea.

[1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3137/

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