[Python-Dev] Python 2.5.1 ported to z/OS and EBCDIC

[Terry Reedy]

"Lauri Alanko" <lealanko at ssh.com> wrote in message 
news:20071022124556.GI30705 at dhcp-54-30.hel.fi.ssh.com...
| All this just shows that treating plain octet sequences as "strings"
| simply won't work in the long run. You have to have separate type for
| _textual_ data (i.e. Unicode strings, in Python), and encode and decode
| between those and octet sequences using some _explicit_ encoding. Of
| course, all non-English-speaking people have been keenly aware of this
| already for ages. The relative universality of ASCII is an exception
| amongst encodings rather than the norm. It's only reasonable to require
| English text to require the same attention to encodings as all the other
| languages.

Setting aside any debate over 'reasonable', I believe the above pretty well 
matchess the design for Py3, except that Guido prefers 'byte' to 'octet'. 
You may end up preferring Py3 for your port.  3.0a2 should be out in a few 
weeks.

| PICKLING
| In the end, for now, I made protocol 0 textual, and disabled support for
| protocol versions > 0 on non-ASCII platforms.

I believe that the plan for pickle in 3.0 is to read any protocol but only 
write the latest (2?), but perhaps this was only a suggestion.