title: Why can't you xor bytes objects in python?
body: <p>I think I understand python bytes objects, but supporting bitwise operations on byte strings seems like such an obvious feature. I don't understand why it is not supported.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt;'abcdefg'.encode('ascii')
  b'abcdefg'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Okay. I went from a string to something like the byte representation of my string in ascii.</p>
  
  <p>So when I try:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; a = 'abcdefg'.encode('ascii')
  &gt;&gt;&gt; a ^ a
    File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
  TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for ^: 'bytes' and 'bytes'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Why? Why doesn't python support this? Is there something I don't understand about bytes objects that makes this unfeasible or ambiguous?</p>