@Terry J. Reedy:

Thanks for the pointer. My inital response is <sadness>, another bloating of namespace. But I'm adjusting.

But that PEP shows the issue with all that activity: CPython stdlib got so big and bloated, that it lives its own life and people consider it normal. So, there're PEPs to perfectalize bytearray, without paying attention to the fact that array.array('B') is pretty much the same thing, but apirots (cf. bitrot) behind it.

So, following PEP467, this request should be updated to call for array.array.zero(typecode, size) factory method. Note that it would need to take 2 arguments to follow array.array API. Is that good or bad? IMHO, not much worse than introducing separate factory method at all. But again, author of PEP467 should rather consider how those proposals extend to other related types.

If you participate in the discussion of the PEP, I'd appreciate if shared there link to this ticket - I'm not in loop of general CPython development and have limited resources to learn/follow them. Thanks.