On 2/13/06, Phillip J. Eby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At 09:55 AM 2/13/2006 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> >One recommendation: for starters, I'd much rather see the bytes type
> >standardized without a literal notation. There should be are lots of
> >ways to create bytes objects from string objects, with specific
> >explicit encodings, and those should suffice, at least initially.
> >
> >I also wonder if having a b"..." literal would just add more confusion
> >-- bytes are not characters, but b"..." makes it appear as if they
> >are.
>
> Why not just have the constructor be:
>
> bytes(initializer [,encoding])
>
> Where initializer must be either an iterable of suitable integers, or a
> unicode/string object. If the latter (i.e., it's a basestring), the
> encoding argument would then be required. Then, there's no need for
> special codec support for the bytes type, since you call bytes on the thing
> to be encoded. And of course, no need for a 'b' literal.
It'd be cruel and unusual punishment though to have to write
bytes("abc", "Latin-1")
I propose that the default encoding (for basestring instances) ought
to be "ascii" just like everywhere else. (Meaning, it should really be
the system default encoding, which defaults to "ascii" and is
intentionally hard to change.)
--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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