[Python-ideas] Py3 unicode impositions

[Cameron Simpson]

On 11Feb2012 13:12, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
| Jim Jewett writes:
|  > Are you saying that some (many?  all?) platforms make a bad choice there?
| 
| No.  I'm saying that whatever choice is made (except for 'latin-1'
| because it accepts all bytes regardless of the actual encoding of the
| data, or PEP 383 "errors='surrogateescape'" for the same reason, both
| of which are unacceptable defaults for production code *for the same
| reason*), there is data that will cause that idiom to fail on Python 3
| where it would not on Python 2.

But...

By your own argument here, the failing is on the part of Python 2
becuase it is passing when it should fail, because it is effectively
using the equivalent of 'latin-1'. And you say right there that that is
unacceptable.

At least with Python 3 you find out early that you're doing something
dodgy.

Disclaimer: I may be talking our my arse here; my personal code is all
Python 2 at present because I haven't found an idle weekend (or, more
likely, week) to spend getting it python 3 ready (meaning parsing ok but
probably failing a bunch of tests to start with).

I do know that in Python 2 I've tripped over a heap of unicode versus
latin-1/maybe-ascii text issues and python unicode-vs-str issues
just recently in Python 2 and a lot of the ambiguity I've been juggling
would be absent in Python 3 (because at least all the strings will be
unicode and I can concentrate on the encoding/decode stuff instead).

[...snip...]
| The fact is that with a little bit of knowledge, you can almost
| certainly get more reliable (and in case of failure, more debuggable)
| results from Python 3 than from Python 2.

That's my hope.

| But people are happy to
| deal with the devil they know, even though it's more noxious than the
| devil they don't.

Not me :-) I speak as one who once moved to MH mail folders and
vi-with-a-few-macros as a mail reader just to break my use of the mail
reader I had been using:-(

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

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overcome careless driving actions.      - Mercedes Benz