On Jan 19, 2008 10:53 AM, Neil Schemenauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Guido van Rossum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > bytes is an alias for str (not even a subclass) > > b"" is an alias for "" > > One advantage of a subclass is that there could be a flag that warns > about combining bytes and unicode data. For example, b"x" + u"y" > would produce a warning. As someone who writes internationalized > software, I would happly use both the byte designating syntax and > the warning flag, even if I wasn't planning to move to Python 3.
Yeah, that's what everybody thinks at first -- but the problem is that most of the time (in 2.6 anyway) the "bytes" object is something read from a socket, for example, not something created from a b"" literal. There is no way to know whether that return value means text or data (plenty of apps legitimately read text straight off a socket in 2.x), so the socket object can't return a bytes instance, and hence the warning won't trigger. Really, the pure aliasing solution is just about optimal in terms of bang per buck. :-) -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
