[Python-Dev] bytes / unicode

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ian Bicking writes:

 > I don't get what you are arguing against.  Are you worried that if
 > we make URL code polymorphic that this will mean some code will
 > treat URLs as bytes, and that code will be incompatible with URLs
 > as text?  No one is arguing we remove text support from any of
 > these functions, only that we allow bytes.

No, I understand what Guido means by "polymorphic".

I'm arguing that as I understand one of Philip Eby's use cases,
"bytes" is a misspelling of "validated" and "unicode" is a misspelling
of "unvalidated".  In case of some kind of bug, polymorphic stdlib
functions would allow propagation of unvalidated/unicode within the
validated zone, aka "errors passing silently".

Now that I understand that that use case doesn't actually care about
bytes vs. unicode *string* semantics at all, the argument becomes
moot, I guess.