[Python-Dev] Bytes path support

[Terry Reedy]

On 8/20/2014 9:01 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> Le 20/08/2014 07:08, Nick Coghlan a écrit :
>>
>> It's not just the JVM that says text and binary APIs should be separate
>> - it's every widely used operating system services layer except POSIX.
>> The POSIX way works well *if* everyone reliably encodes things as UTF-8
>> or always uses encoding detection, but its failure mode is unfortunately
>> silent data corruption.
>>
>> That said, there's a lot of Python software that is POSIX specific,
>> where bytes paths would be the least of the barriers to porting to
>> Windows or Jython. I'm personally +1 on consistently allowing binary
>> paths in lower level APIs, but disallowing them in higher level
>> explicitly cross platform abstractions like pathlib.
>
> I fully agree with Nick's position here.
>
> To elaborate specifically about pathlib, it doesn't handle bytes paths
> but allows you to generate them if desired:
> https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html#operators
>
> Adding full bytes support to pathlib would have added a lot of
> complication and fragility in the implementation *and* in the API (is it
> allowed to combine str and bytes paths? should they have separate
> classes?), for arguably little benefit.

I am glad you did not recreate the madness of pre 3.0 Python in that regard.

> I think if you want low-level features (such as unconverted bytes paths
> under POSIX), it is reasonable to point you to low-level APIs.

Do our docs somewhere explain the idea that files names are conceptually 
*names*, not arbitrary bytes; explain the concept of low-level versus 
high-level API' and point to the two types of APIs in Python?

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy