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

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 2008-05-22 13:58, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> M.-A. Lemburg <mal <at> egenix.com> writes:
>> It's all a matter of perspective. You can say you're encoding Latin-1
>> to Unicode, or you can say your encoding Unicode to Latin-1.
> 
> Except that Latin-1 is an encoding while Unicode is not. So I don't see how you
> can encode to Unicode. Of course you can encode to UTF-8, UTF-16, etc. - which
> /are/ encodings (and, in this case, Python returns you a bytes object :-)).

Well, yes and no :-)

Unicode does encode a way to describe code points. The assignments
of integers to letters, symbols, etc. (ie. a "character set")
provides the encoding, so you can call it "encoding" as well.

OTOH, Unicode is the mother of all character sets so to speak (even
though in this case, many children existed before the mother was
formed ;-), so it has a special status.

In practice the terms "encoding" and "character set" are often
used interchangeably, just as most people talk about "characters"
when referring to "code points" and/or "glyphs", or happily mix
"UTF-8", "UTF-16" and "Unicode".

The Unicode consortium usually uses the terms "UCS2" and "UCS4"
when referring to Unicode as "character set", but even there
you have an ordering which makes it an encoding.

See my talk on Unicode for some clarification:

http://www.egenix.com/library/presentations/

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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