[Python-Dev] PEP 414 - Unicode Literals for Python 3

[Terry Reedy]

On 2/27/2012 4:10 PM, Chris McDonough wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-02-27 at 21:07 +0000, Paul Moore wrote:
>> On 27 February 2012 20:39, Chris McDonough<chrism at plope.com>  wrote:
>>> Note that u'' literals are sort of the tip of the iceberg here;
>>> supporting them will obviously not make development under the subset an
>>> order of magnitude less sucky, just a tiny little bit less sucky.  There
>>> are other extremely annoying things, like str(bytes) returning the repr
>>> of a bytestring on Python 3.  That's almost as irritating as the absence
>>> of u'' literals, but we have to evaluate one thing at a time.
>>
>> So. Am I misunderstanding here, or are you suggesting that this
>> particular PEP doesn't help you much, but if it's accepted, it
>> represents "the thin end of the wedge" for a series of subsequent PEPs
>> suggesting fixes for a number of other "extremely annoying things"...?

Last December, Armin wrote
"And in my absolutely personal opinion Python 3.3/3.4 should be more 
like Python 2* and Python 2.8 should happen and be a bit more like 
Python 3."
* he wrote '3' but obviously means '2'.
http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/12/7/thoughts-on-python3/

>> I'm sure that's not what you meant, but it's certainly what it sounded
>> like to me!
>
> I'm way too lazy.  The political wrangling is just too draining
> (especially over something so trivial).

Turning Python 3 back into Python 2, or even moving in that direction, 
is neither 'trivial' nor a 'no-brainer'.

 > But I will definitely support
> other proposals that make it easier to straddle, sure.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy