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From: Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 13:20:32 -0600
Subject: Re: Python 3.x and bytes
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Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.python:5598

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 12:47 PM, Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> In Python 3 one can say
>
> --> huh =3D bytes(5)
>
> Since the bytes type is actually a list of integers, I would have expecte=
d
> this to have huh being a bytestring with one element -- the integer 5.
> =A0Actually, what you get is:
>
> --> huh
> b'\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00'
>
> or five null bytes. =A0Note that this is an immutable type, so you cannot=
 go
> in later and say
>
> --> huh[3] =3D 9
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> =A0File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> TypeError: 'bytes' object does not support item assignment
>
>
> So, out of curiosity, does anyone actually use this, um, feature?

I suppose it's for interoperability with the mutable bytearray type,
which takes the same parameters in the constructor.