[Python-Dev] Strange error importing a Pickle from 2.7 to 3.2

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

M.-A. Lemburg writes:

 > "Latin-1" is short for "Latin Alphabet No. 1" [...].

 > I assume that since the HTML standard used the more popular
 > name "Latin-1" for its definition of the default character set
 > and also made use of the term throughout the spec, it
 > became the de-facto standard name for that character set
 > at the time.

As usual with de facto standards, it got "embraced and extended".
I've seen people seriously contend that Windows-1252 is an
"implementation" or (conformant) extension of "Latin-1", and that the
EURO SIGN is now a member of "Latin-1".  It's just too ambiguous for
my taste; I avoid it in discussions of character sets, preferring to
be thought idiosyncratic and pedantic.

As for the spelling, I think "Latin-1" is slightly more readable than
"Latin1", but the latter is in the same degree more typable.<wink>

 > For much the same reasons, "ISO-10646" never really became
 > popular, but "Unicode" eventually did.

No, there are much more important reasons why "Unicode" became
popular.  IMHO, as an encoding standard ISO-10646 had a slight edge
over Unicode in the early 1990s, before the two were unified as coded
character sets.  However, as a text processing system there simply was
no comparison.  Unicode provided a large number of standard
facilities, and was clearly set to add to those, that were way outside
of the scope of ISO 10646.  Claiming Unicode conformance was a much
bigger deal than ISO 10646 (not to mention having the "advantage" that
you could *optionally* save Intel shorts to disk without swabbing them
first).