Re: RFC: PEP 460: Add bytes % args and bytes.format(args) to Python 3.5

On 01/08/2014 02:42 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>
> With Victor's consent, I overhauled PEP 460 and made the feature set
> more restricted and consistent with the bytes/str separation.

 From the PEP:
=============
> Python 3 generally mandates that text be stored and manipulated as
>  unicode (i.e. str objects, not bytes). In some cases, though, it
>  makes sense to manipulate bytes objects directly. Typical usage is
>  binary network protocols, where you can want to interpolate and
>  assemble several bytes object (some of them literals, some of them
>  compute) to produce complete protocol messages. For example,
>  protocols such as HTTP or SIP have headers with ASCII names and
>  opaque "textual" values using a varying and/or sometimes ill-defined
>  encoding. Moreover, those headers can be followed by a binary
>  body... which can be chunked and decorated with ASCII headers and
>  trailers!

As it stands now, the PEP talks about ASCII, about how it makes sense sometimes to work directly
with bytes objects, and 
then refuses to allow % to embed ASCII text in the byte stream.

> All other features present in formatting of str objects (either
>  through the percent operator or the str.format() method) are
>  unsupported. Those features imply treating the recipient of the
>  operator or method as text, which goes counter to the text / bytes
>  separation (for example, accepting %d as a format code would imply
>  that the bytes object really is a ASCII-compatible text string).

No, it implies that portion of the byte stream is ASCII compatible.  And we have several examples:
PDF, HTML, DBF, just 
about every network protocol (not counting M$), and, I'm sure, plenty I haven't heard of.


-1 on the PEP as it stands now.

--
~Ethan~