"Byte" type?

[Mark Tolonen]

"John Nagle" <nagle at animats.com> wrote in message 
news:499841bf$0$1624$742ec2ed at news.sonic.net...
> Benjamin Peterson wrote:
>> Steve Holden <steve <at> holdenweb.com> writes:
>>> Beware, also, that in 2.6 the "bytes" type is essentially an ugly hack
>>> to enable easier forward compatibility with the 3.X series ...
>>
>> It's not an ugly hack. It just isn't all that you might hope it'd live up 
>> to be.
>
>    The semantics aren't what the naive user would expect.  One would
> expect an element of a bytearray to be a small integer.  But instead,
> it has string-like behavior.  "+" means concatenate, not add.
> The bit operators don't work at all.
>
> Python 2.6.1 ...
> >>> a = b'A'
> >>> b = b'B'
> >>> a+b
> 'AB'
> >>> a[0]+b[0]
> 'AB'
> >>>>>> a = b'A'
> >>> b = b'B'
> >>> a+b
> 'AB'
> >>> a[0]+b[0]
> 'AB'
> >>>
> >>> a & b
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for &: 'str' and 'str'
>
>    Given that the intent of bytearray is that it's a data type for
> handling raw binary data of unknown format, one might expect it to behave 
> like
> "array.array('B')", which is an array of unsigned bytes that are
> treated as integers.  But that's not how "bytearray" works.  "bytearray"
> is more like the old meaning of "str", before Unicode support, circa 
> Python 2.1.

It *is* the old meaning of str.  It isn't a bytearray object in 2.6.X (and 
it isn't a bytearray object in 3.X either, but a bytes object):

Python 2.6.1 (r261:67517, Dec  4 2008, 16:51:00) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] 
on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> type(b'x')
<type 'str'>
>>> b'x'[0]
'x'

As Steve said, it is just an aliased type.  In 3.X it is really a bytes 
object:

Python 3.0.1 (r301:69561, Feb 13 2009, 20:04:18) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] 
on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> type(b'x')
<class 'bytes'>
>>> b'x'[0]
120

-Mark