[Python-Dev] bytes / unicode

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Jun 22, 2010, at 12:53 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 11:47 PM, Raymond Hettinger
> <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Jun 21, 2010, at 10:31 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
>> 
>> This is a common pain-point for porting software to 3.x - you had a
>> string, it kinda worked most of the time before, but now you need to keep
>> track of text too and the functions which seemed to work on bytes no longer
>> do.
>> 
>> Thanks Glyph.  That is a nice summary of one kind of challenge facing
>> programmers.
> 
> Ironically, Glyph also described the pain in 2.x: it only "kinda" worked.

It was not my intention to be ironic about it - that was exactly what I meant :).  3.x is forcing you to confront an issue that you _should_ have confronted for 2.x anyway. 

(And, I hope, most libraries doing a 3.x migration will take the opportunity to make their 2.x APIs unicode-clean while still in 2to3 mode, and jump ship to 3.x source only _after_ there's a nice transition path for their clients that can be taken in 2 steps.)