[Python-3000] PEP 3138- String representation in Python 3000

[Guido van Rossum]

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 5:16 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Wasn't there a big discussion once before about whether
> encode/decode should be usable for things other than
> unicode<->non-unicode transformations? I thought the
> conclusion reached back then was that they shouldn't.

That was before the idea was brought up to have separate APIs for the
X<->X transforms. The reason to drop those was making the type
signatures of .encode() and .decode() predictable, which is much more
of a concern in 3.0 than it is in 2.x where it's basically string in,
string out and whether that's unicode of 8-bit is a minor detail (in
some cases at least).

> Is there some reason the transformations being talked
> about can't just be provided as functions that operate
> on strings or bytes?

Several people have explained that having these available as
transformations and being able to register new transformations is very
convenient; there is plenty of existing use in 2.x of this feature, so
we're not inventing something new.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)