On Saturday 05 May 2007, Aahz wrote: > I'm with MAL and Fred on making literals immutable -- that's safe and > lots of newbies will need to use byte literals early in their Python > experience if they pick up Python to operate on network data. Yes; there are lots of places where bytes literals will be used the way str literals are today. buffer(b'...') might be good enough, but it seems more than a little idiomatic, and doesn't seem particularly readable. I'm not suggesting that /all/ literals result in constants, but bytes literals seem like a case where what's wanted is the value. If b'...' results in a new object on every reference, that's a lot of overhead for a network protocol implementation, where the data is just going to be written to a socket or concatenated with other data. An immutable bytes type would be very useful as a dictionary key as well, and more space-efficient than tuple(b'...'). Whether there should be one type with a flag indicating mutability, or two separate types (as with set and frozenset), I'm not sure. The later offers some small performance benefits, but I don't expect there's enough to really matter there. -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org>
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