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From: "Frank Millman" <frank@chagford.com>
Subject: Re: Python 3 is killing Python
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 07:18:54 +0200
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"Steven D'Aprano" <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> wrote in message 
news:53c66ba8$0$9505$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com...
>
> E.g. having b"abc"[0] return 97 instead of b"a" was probably a mistake,
> but there are four versions of Python 3.x that do it that way and it's
> too late to change until Python 5000. (Python 4 is unlikely to break
> backwards compatibility in a big way.)
>

If it was considered important enough, couldn't they just introduce a new 
datatype, say B'...', with the desired behaviour. B'' would be backported to 
Python 2.7 as an alternative to b'', to faciliate writing code that works on 
both versions.

There would be a lot of overlap with b'...', but the differences could be 
documented. Methods could be added to B'' to replicate any behaviour of b'' 
which has been changed. Then over time b'' could be deprecated, and in 
Python 4 b'' could replace B''.

Frank Millman