On 2014-01-08, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 11:15 AM, Steven D'Aprano ><steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >> Why decide that the bytes type is best considered as a list of >> bytes rather than a string of bytes? It doesn't have any list methods, it >> looks like a string and people use it as a string. As you have discovered, >> it is an inconvenient annoyance that indexing returns an int instead of a >> one-byte byte-string. >> >> I think that, in hindsight, this was a major screw-up in Python 3. > > Which part was?
The fact that b'ASDF'[0] in Python2 yeilds something different than it does in Python3 -- one yields b'A' and the other yields 0x41. It makes portable code a lot harder to write. I don't really have any preference for one over the other, but changing it for no apparent reason was a horrible idea. -- Grant -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
