using binary in python

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:

> On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 12:25 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
>> but personally I would prefer the programming language
>> just give me the OS, warts and all.
>
> Then you don't want Python. The point of Python is to give you data
> types like "list", "dict", "int" (not a machine word but a bignum),
> and so on.

Those examples are out of the scope of the OS abstraction.

> It's NOT meant to be a thin wrapper around what your OS
> offers.

Thankfully, Python hasn't yet taken that away. I can do a lot of nice
things with socket.* and os.* that are unavailable in, say, Java.

> Python's string is a Unicode string, not a series of bytes (as is C's
> char* type), because human text is better represented as Unicode than
> as bytes;

No problem there, either.

> so it stands to reason that Python's files should be able to contain
> text,

Yes, and lists and dicts and ints and objects and all. No problem there.

However, when filenames and sys.stdin deal with text, things are getting
iffy.


Marko