[issue20895] Add bytes.empty_buffer and deprecate bytes(17) for the same purpose

[Josh Rosenberg]

Josh Rosenberg added the comment:

I would think the argument for deprecation is that usually, people type bytes(7) or bytes(somesmallintvalue) expecting to create a length one bytes object using that value (happens by accident if you iterate a bytes object and forget it's an iterable of ints, not an iterable of len 1 bytes). It's really easy to forget to make it bytes([7]) or bytes((7,)) or what have you. If you make the same mistake with str, list, tuple, etc., you get an error, because they only accept iterables. But bytes silently behaves in a way that is inconsistent with the other sequence types.

Given that b'\0' * 7 is usually faster in any event (by avoiding lookup costs to find the bytes constructor) and more intuitive to people familiar with the Python sequence idiom, I could definitely see this as a redundancy that does nothing but confuse.

----------
nosy: +josh.rosenberg

_______________________________________
Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue20895>
_______________________________________