Bytes indexing returns an int

[Steven D'Aprano]

Does anyone know what the rationale behind making byte-string indexing
return an int rather than a byte-string of length one?

That is, given b = b'xyz', b[1] returns 121 rather than b'y'.

This is especially surprising when one considers that it's easy to extract
the ordinal value of a byte:

ord(b'y') => 121



-- 
Steven