Bytes indexing returns an int

[Terry Reedy]

On 1/7/2014 6:13 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Does anyone know what the rationale behind making byte-string indexing
> return an int rather than a byte-string of length one?
>
> That is, given b = b'xyz', b[1] returns 121 rather than b'y'.

This former is the normal behavior of sequences, the latter is peculiar 
to strings, because there is no separate character class. A byte is a 
count n, 0 <= n < 256 and bytes and bytearrays are sequences of bytes. 
It was ultimately Guido's decision after some discussion and debate on, 
I believe, the py3k list. I do not remember enough to be any more specific.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy