Python 3 is killing Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 17 Jul 2014 07:18:54 +0200, Frank Millman wrote:

> "Steven D'Aprano" <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote in
> message news:53c66ba8$0$9505$c3e8da3$5496439d at news.astraweb.com...
>>
>> E.g. having b"abc"[0] return 97 instead of b"a" was probably a mistake,
>> but there are four versions of Python 3.x that do it that way and it's
>> too late to change until Python 5000. (Python 4 is unlikely to break
>> backwards compatibility in a big way.)
>>
>>
> If it was considered important enough, couldn't they just introduce a
> new datatype, say B'...', with the desired behaviour. B'' would be
> backported to Python 2.7 as an alternative to b'', to faciliate writing
> code that works on both versions.

Sure, if it were considered important enough. But such an addition would 
add complexity and redundancy to the language, and would add one more 
thing that people have to learn and decide about. People would confuse 
which one was which, which would lead to bugs.

Since b'abcd'[0:1] takes only a tiny bit more effort than b'abcd'[0], 
fixing this is not considered worth the cost.


-- 
Steven