On 9/25/07, Guido van Rossum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > OK, Jeffrey's and Adam's patches were helpful; it looks like the > damage done by making bytes immutable is pretty limited: plenty of > modules are affected, but the changes are straightforward and > localized. > > So now I have an idea that goes a little farther. It relates to > Talin's response (second message in this thread if you're using gmail) > and acknowledges that there are some good use cases for mutable bytes > as well (as I've always maintained). > > How about we take the existing PyString implementation (Python 2's > str, currently still present as str8 in py3k), remove the locale and > unicode mixing support, and call it bytes. Then the PyBytes type can > be renamed to buffer. It is well-documented that I don't care much > about the existing buffer() builtin; it can be renamed to memview for > all I care (that would be a more descriptive name anyway).
D'oh. Travis already implemented a memoryview object that has most of the required properties. So let's use that instead of memview or the old buffer object. > This would provide a much better transitional path for 2.x code > manipulating raw bytes using str instances: just change "..." into > b"..." and str into bytes. (Of course, 2.x code that is confused about > bytes vs. characters will fail hard in 3.0 as soon as a bytes and a > str instance meet -- this is already the case in the current 3.0 code > base and will remain unchanged.) > > It would mean more fixes beyond what Jeffrey and Adam did, since > iterating over a bytes instance would return a bytes instance of > length 1 instead of a small int, and the bytes constructor would > change accordingly (no more initializing a bytes object from a list of > ints). > > The (new) buffer object would also have to change to be more > compatible with the (new) bytes object -- bytes<-->buffer conversions > should be 1-1, and iterating over a buffer instance would also have to > return a length-1 buffer (or bytes???) instance. > > Thoughts? -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
