[Python-Dev] Bytes path support

[Terry Reedy]

On 8/26/2014 9:11 AM, R. David Murray wrote:
> 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

Nick, I think the first half of your post is one of the clearest 
expositions yet of 'why Python 3' (in particular, the str to unicode 
change).  It is worthy of wider distribution and without much change, it 
would be a great blog post.

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

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy