[Python-Dev] Migration from Python 2.7 and bytes formatting

[Neil Schemenauer]

On 2014-01-18, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> The above are descriptions of current behavior (ie, unchanged by PEPs
> 460, 461), and this:
[..]
> is the content of this proposal, is that right?

The proposal is that -2 enables the following:

- %r as an alias for %a (i.e. calls ascii())
    
- %s will fallback to calling PyObject_Str() and then
  call _PyUnicode_AsASCIIString(obj, "strict") to
  convert to bytes

That's it.  After sleeping on it, I'm not sure that's enough Python
2.x compatibility to help a lot.  I haven't ported much code to 3.x
yet but I imagine the following are major challenges:

- comparisons between str and bytes always returns unequal

- indexing/iterating bytes returns integers, not bytes objects

- concatenation of str and bytes fails (not so bad since
  a TypeError is generated right away).


Maybe the -2 command line option could revert to Python 2.x behavior
for the above but I'm worried it might break working 3.x library
code (the %r/%s change is very safe).  I think I'll play with the
idea and see which unit tests get broken.  Ideally, there would be
warnings generated when each backwards compatible behavior kicks in,
that would greatly help when fixing up code.

  Neil