Mutable Bytes

<moved from prothon-dev>

Martin Christensen <[email protected]> wrote:

Howdy!

I've been implementing a bitmap index in Python, where I'm using
regular strings to store the bitmap. Considering all the time that's
spent in ord() and chr(), I'm sure you can imagine that I'll be quite
glad of Prothon's Bytes when it comes to porting it. :-)

However, one thing irks me: when Bytes is meant for raw data
manipulation, why is it immutable? I don't imagine it being an overly
likely candidate for dictionary keys and such, though of course you
never know. I just find it rather surprising that with a data type
like this, I still have to resort to something as inefficient as

data = data[:i] + newbyte + data[i+1:]

just to change a single byte. Or did I miss something? So my request
is to make the Bytes type mutable unless there's some other good
reason not to do so.

Martin

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