[Python-Dev] [Email-SIG] the email module, text, and bytes (was Re: Dropping bytes "support" in json)

[Guido van Rossum]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> On Apr 10, 2009, at 3:06 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>
>> Bill Janssen writes:
>>>
>>> Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> In that case, we really need the
>>>> bytes-in-bytes-out-bytes-in-the-chewy-
>>>> center API first, and build things on top of that.
>>>
>>> Yep.
>>
>> Uh, I hate to rain on a parade, but isn't that how we arrived at the
>> *current* email package?
>
> Not really.  We got here because <ahem>we</ahem> were too damn sloppy about
> the distinction.

Agreed. I take full responsibility -- the str/unicode approach we
introduced in 2.0 seemed like the best thing we could do at the time,
but in retrospect it would've been better if we'd left str alone and
introduced a unicode type that was truly distinct -- like str in 3.0.
The email package is not the only system that ended up with a muddled
distinction between the two as a result.

> I'm going to remove python-dev from subsequent follow ups.  Please join us
> at email-sig for further discussion.
>
>Barry

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)