Cult-like behaviour [was Re: Kindness]

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Rhodri James <rhodri at kynesim.co.uk>:
> On 17/07/18 02:17, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> Ah yes, the unfortunate design error that iterating over byte-strings
>> returns ints rather than single-byte strings.
>>
>> That decision seemed to make sense at the time it was made, but turned
>> out to be an annoyance. It's a wart on Python 3, but fortunately one
>> which is fairly easily dealt with by a helper function.
>
> I don't think I agree with you, but that may just be my heritage as a C
> programmer.  Every time I've iterated over a byte string, I've really
> meant bytes (as in integers).  Those bytes may correspond to ASCII
> characters, but that's just a detail.

The practical issue is how you refer to ASCII bytes. What I've resorted
to is:

      if nxt == b":"[0]:
          ...

Alternatively, I *could* write:

      if nxt in b":":
          ...

What's your favorite way of expressing character constants?


Marko