Ethan Furman writes: > `int.from_bytes` methods, and is an appropriate name for the target > domain (where bytes are treated as characters).
The relevant domains treat bytes as bytes. It's frequently useful (and dare I say "Pythonic"?) for *programmers* to take advantage of the mnemonic of treating 95 of the bytes as the ASCII encoding of characters. It follows that it's good sense for protocol designers to restrict themselves to that alphabet for their magic numbers. But standards themselves make clear that these protocols handle *octets* (historically, "byte" was too ambiguous for network protocols!), not characters or ints that happen to fit into 8 bits. The "control characters" aren't really characters even when they're syntactically significant, some of them are not significant unless combined in a particular order (CRLF), and of course the bytes 0x80-0xFF are never treated as characters. As far as I can see, the "programmers' mnemonic" interpretation gets us everything we really want in this area. We should avoid the idea that "bytes are treated as characters" because they aren't, and because that way lies the madness that incited the upheaval of Python 3 in the first place. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/DCSW7WLND6SZ6CGV4BZXP6QEOS2MZ7FA/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
