Python 3.2 has some deadly infection

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 2:17 AM, Robin Becker <robin at reportlab.com> wrote:
> in python 2 str and unicode were much more comparable. On balance I think
> just reversing them ie str --> bytes and unicode --> str was probably the
> right thing to do if the default conversions had been turned off. However
> making bytes a crippled thing was wrong.

It's easy to build up functionality after the event. Maybe reportlab
will have lots of hacks to support both 2.7 and 3.3, but in a few
years you'll be able to say "supports 2.7 and 3.5" and take advantage
of percent formatting and whatever else is added. But this is just the
way that languages develop; you use them, you find what isn't easy,
and you fix it. The nature of stability is that it takes time before
you can depend on freshly-written functionality (contrast the extreme
instability of running the version from source control - stuff might
be fixed at any time, but you have to do all the work yourself to make
sure your dependencies line up), but over time, you can depend on
improvements making their way out there.

Can you point to specific areas in which the bytes type is "crippled"?
Comparing either to the Py2 str or the Py3 str, or to anything else?
The Python core devs are listening, as evidenced by PEP 461.

ChrisA