[Python-Dev] PEP 414

[Lennart Regebro]

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 10:26, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Lennart Regebro <regebro <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>> So the question is if you have any proposal that is *less* confusing
>> while still being practical. Because we do need to distinguish between
>> binary, Unicode and "native" strings. Isn't this the least confusing
>> solution?
>
> It's a matter of the degree of confusion caused (hard to assess) and also a
> question of taste, so there will be differing views on this. Considering use of
> unicode_literals, 'xxx' for text, b'yyy' for bytes and with a function wrapper
> to mark native strings, it becomes clear that the native strings are special
> cases - much less encountered when looking at code compared to 'xxx' / b'yyy',

I'm not sure that's true at all. In most cases where you support both
Python 2 and Python 3, most strings will be "native", ie, without
prefix in either Python 2 or Python 3. The native case is the most
common case.

> In terms of practicality, it is
> IMO quite practical (assuming 2.5 / earlier support can be dropped) to move to a
> 2.6+/3.x-friendly codebase, e.g. by using Armin's python-modernize.

I think there is some misunderstanding here. The binary/unicode/native
separation is only possible on Python 2.6 and 2.7 at the moment,
unless you use function wrappers like b().

//Lennart