Language design

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 11 Sep 2013 01:03:48 +0100, Nobody wrote:

> On Tue, 10 Sep 2013 17:07:09 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> 
>> * Python requires every programmer to know, or quickly learn, the
>> basics
>>   of Unicode: to know that text is not, and never will be again,
>>   synonymous with a sequence of bytes.
> 
> If only the Python developers would learn the same lesson ...
> 
> Some of them are so hooked on Unicode that they won't accept that
> sometimes a sequence of bytes really is just a sequence of bytes.
> Primary example: most of the POSIX API.

And lo, Guido's Time Machine strikes again. Python 3 has not one but TWO 
built-in types for handling sequences of bytes:

* bytes  # immutable string of bytes
* bytearray  # mutable array of bytes


and most routines that handle file names accept either text strings or 
bytes strings:


py> open('aß', 'w').write("hello\n")
6
py> open(b'a\xc3\x9f', 'r').read()
'hello\n'



-- 
Steven