[Zope3-dev] Re: What does python 3000 mean for zope?

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

On 1 Sep 2007, at 19:39 , Stephan Richter wrote:
> On Friday 31 August 2007 23:35, Fred Drake wrote:
>> A biggie is going to be the replacement of immutable str for binary
>> data; that gets replaced with a mutable bytes object.  It'll be good
>> to have, but the loss of an immutable sequence-of-bytes type seems
>> like a problem to me.
>
> Oh, I did not know that bytes will be mutable.

*will*? *are*.

> While I see why you would want
> to do this, I agree this will have some many subtle side effects  
> that it will
> take us a while to get all the code changed reliably.

One of the side effects is that bytes can't be used as dictionary keys.

Anway, looking at Py3k is nice for any sort of experiments, but I  
don't think we can draw any useful conclusions at this point. Too  
much is undecided so far:

* C API is not stable at all
* Guido doesn't know yet whether the str8 type will remain for BBB or  
not (str8 is the old immutable 8bit str from Python 2.x)
* Reorganization of stdlib is undecided yet.

There are other smaller things that I trust will spawn some  
discussion in the community and could lead to potential refactorings.  
One example I discovered is that open('/file/name') currently opens  
files in text-mode by default (even on Unix) which means it reads  
'str' (unicode!) instead of bytes by default. I don't even want to  
know how they think they can automatically deduce whether you meant  
to open in text or binary mode with their '2to3' tool... And  
according to Guido, we're not supposed to edit the generated code for  
python3 either. Yeah, right.