Cult-like behaviour [was Re: Kindness]

[Rhodri James]

On 17/07/18 14:14, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> 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?

If I'm feeling particularly expansive, I'll do what Peter does and 
define COLON or use ord(":") directly.  Most of the time though I'll 
just use:

     if next == 0x3a:  # colon
        ...

But then, as I said, I am mostly a C programmer who happens to write 
Python when he gets the chance.

-- 
Rhodri James *-* Kynesim Ltd