RE: Mutable Bytes

Martin Christensen wrote

>I have almost no experience working directly with raw data, 
>having almost exclusively dealt with data on a more abstract 
>level, so I'm surely not the best judge. However, I tend to 
>think of raw data very much as a mutable thing: manipulating 
>bodies of raw data solely by means of cutting them up and 
>putting them back together again afterwards doesn't match my 
>mental model of what I'm doing very well. When working with 
>text strings, this procedure makes much more sense, since 
>usually strings are broken up into, and pieced together from, 
>parts that make sense to a human, e.g. words and sentences.

I haven't implemented it yet, but I have on the to-do list to implement
Bytes methods that mimic the struct type capabilities that Python has in a
module.  This would allow you to treat the Bytes data in a bit more
high-level contstruct of C structs.  It would also allow you to treat the
data as an array of structs.  I'm open to more ideas in this area.

I still haven't been able to wrap my mind around whether this means Bytes
should be mutable or not.  I am too biased being that I am so focused on the
internals. I'll take your input as one vote for making Bytes mutable and
I'll abstain for now.

Can I get some comments and votes from everyone else?

...<snip>...

>If mine differs 
>from everyone else's, then of course my ramblings should just 
>be ignored. :-)

I would think the opposite.  Mainstream opinions are worth less than unique
ones.