[Python-Dev] Bytes path support

[R. David Murray]

On Sun, 24 Aug 2014 13:27:55 +1000, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> As some examples of where bilingual computing breaks down:
> 
> * My NFS client and server may have different locale settings
> * My FTP client and server may have different locale settings
> * My SSH client and server may have different locale settings
> * I save a file locally and send it to someone with a different locale setting
> * I attempt to access a Windows share from a Linux client (or vice-versa)
> * I clone my POSIX hosted git or Mercurial repository on a Windows client
> * I have to connect my Linux client to a Windows Active Directory
> domain (or vice-versa)
> * I have to interoperate between native code and JVM code
> 
> The entire computing industry is currently struggling with this
> monolingual (ASCII/Extended ASCII/EBCDIC/etc) -> bilingual (locale
> encoding/code pages) -> multilingual (Unicode) transition. It's been
> going on for decades, and it's still going to be quite some time
> before we're done.
> 
> The POSIX world is slowly clawing its way towards a multilingual model
> that actually works: UTF-8
> Windows (including the CLR) and the JVM adopted a different
> multilingual model, but still one that actually works: UTF-16-LE

This kind of puts the "length" of the python2->python3 transition
period in perspective, doesn't it?

--David