The patches changes:

- change PyString's repr() to return "b'...'"
- change PyBytes's repr() to return "buffer(b'...')"
- change parser so that b"..." returns PyString, not PyBytes
- rename bytes -> buffer, str8 -> bytes

The patch breaks some unit test because some of the infrastructure like
the new buffer() isn't in place yet. I'm not happy with bytes_repr() but
the for loop with *p++ was the easiest way to implement it. Every other
implementation I could think of was either too complicated or wouldn't
work (like memcpy).

I am not sure how the parser work, so I can't comment if your change to
it is correct. It would probably a better idea to keep it for later,
when the semantic differences between str8 and bytes objects will be
resolved.

I think changing b'' to buffer(b''), in the tests, is not a good idea.
These tests will need to be changed again when bytes() will be changed
to str8().

Your changes to PyString and PyBytes look good to me. As I said on the
mailing list, I think the for-loops in bytes_repr() should be changed to:

    while (*quote_prefix)
        *p++ = *quote_prefix++;

I attached updated patches with the above change. I also replaced
bytes() for buffer() in PyBytes's docstrings.

GHave you two agreed yet as to which patch(es) I should look at?

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Guido van Rossum added the comment:
> 
> GHave you two agreed yet as to which patch(es) I should look at?

Please commit Alexandres patch. His patch for bytesobject.c is based on
my patch. It's more complete and a bit better than mine, too. I'm going
to create a new patch for the other tasks later.

I don't think I can check these in yet; right now they are inconsistent.
But I will check them in when they are ready.

Setting to 'high' everything related to PEP 3137.

Here is the patch that contains only the harmless parts of the previous
patches. It changes a bunch of doc strings, changes the name of the
types and their repr() and str(). It also adds __builtin__.buffer but it
leaves __builtin__.bytes, __builtin__.str8 and b'' as they are.

I've submitted the 'harmless' patch (and much, much more) in r58741.
I'm closing this now, the rest probably has been implemented one way or
another as well.  If you see something I missed, please open a new issue
with a patch for just that issue.