PEP 383: Non-decodable Bytes in System Character Interfaces

[Cameron Simpson]

On 24Apr2009 09:27, I wrote:
| If I'm writing a general purpose UNIX tool like chmod or find, I expect
| it to work reliably on _any_ UNIX pathname. It must be totally encoding
| blind. If I speak to the os.* interface to open a file, I expect to hand
| it bytes and have it behave. As an explicit example, I would be just fine
| with python's open(filename, "w") to take a string and encode it for use,
| but _not_ ok for os.open() to require me to supply a string and cross
| my fingers and hope something sane happens when it is turned into bytes
| for the UNIX system call.
| 
| I'm very much in favour of being able to work in strings for most
| purposes, but if I use the os.* interfaces on a UNIX system it is
| necessary to be _able_ to work in bytes, because UNIX file pathnames
| are bytes.

Just to follow up to my own words here, I would be ok for all the
pure-byte stuff to be off in the "posix" module if os.* goes pure
character instead of bytes or bytes+strings.
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

... that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been
approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be
left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another
place of decimals.      - James Clerk Maxwell (1813-1879)
                          Scientific Papers 2, 244, October 1871