Thanks for bringing this up. I asked about this on reddit yesterday[1] and was linked the thread where they originally discussed this[2]. Basically, the goal is to make porting from 2 to 3 easier, and there's also a notion that printf-style formatting may be more natural than format-style formatting for bytes.
I still wish they were consistent and provided a .format method for bytes, especially since, as you point out, .format was supposed to be the "new way" to do formatting and this feels like a step backwards. And what about backward compatibility for porting Python 2 code that used .format to do formatting on what are semantically byte strings?
I still wish they were consistent and provided a .format method for bytes, especially since, as you point out, .format was supposed to be the "new way" to do formatting and this feels like a step backwards. And what about backward compatibility for porting Python 2 code that used .format to do formatting on what are semantically byte strings?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/3c7lne/python_350b3...
[2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.devel/144712/focus...