9 Feb
2016
9 Feb
'16
1 p.m.
Chris Barker - NOAA Federal writes:
All I can say is "ouch". Hard to call it a regression to no longer allow this mess...
We can't "disallow" the mess, it's embedded in the lunatic computing environment (which I happen to live in). We can't even stop people from using existing Python programs abusing bytes-oriented APIs. All we can do is make it harder for people to port to Python 3, and that would be bad because it's much easier to refactor once you're in Python 3. And as Paul points out, it works fine in ASCII-compatible one-byte environments (and probably in ISO-2022-compatible 8-bit multibyte environments, too -- the big problems are the abominations known as Shift JIS and Big5). Please, let's leave it alone.