Assignment Versus Equality
Steven D'Aprano
steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info
Tue Jun 28 01:42:45 EDT 2016
On Tuesday 28 June 2016 14:31, Rustom Mody wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 28, 2016 at 6:36:06 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> On Tue, 28 Jun 2016 12:23 am, Rustom Mody wrote:
>> > Also how is GG deliberately downgrading clear unicode content to be kind
>> > to obsolete clients at recipient end different from python 2 → 3 making
>> > breaking changes but not going beyond ASCII lexemes?
>>
>> Oh yes, I completely agree, obviously GvR is literally worse than Hitler
>> because he hasn't added a bunch of Unicode characters with poor support for
>> input and worse support for output as essential syntactic elements to
>> Python.
>>
>> /s
>
> Gratuitous Godwin acceleration produceth poor sarcasm -- try again
> And while you are at it try and answer the parallel:
> Unicode has a major pro and con
> Pro: Its a superset and enormously richer than ASCII
Correct.
> Con: It is costly and implementations are spotty
That's a matter of opinion. What do you mean by "spotty"?
It seems to me that implementations are mostly pretty good, at least as good as
Python 2 narrow builds. Support for astral characters is not as good, but
(apart from some Han users, and a few specialist niches) not as import either.
The big problem is poor tooling: fonts still have many missing characters, and
editors don't make it easy to enter anything not visible on the keyboard.
> GG downgrades posts containing unicode if it can, thereby increasing reach to
> recipients with unicode-broken clients
And how does that encourage clients to support Unicode? It just enables
developers to tell themselves "It's just a few weirdos and foreigners who use
Unicode, ASCII [by which they mean Latin 1] is good enough for everyone."
Its 2016, and it is *way* past time that application developers stop pandering
to legacy encodings by making them the default. If developers saw that 99% of
emails were UTF-8, they would be less likely to think they could avoid learning
about Unicode.
> Likewise this:
>
>> a bunch of Unicode characters with poor support for
>> input and worse support for output as essential syntactic elements to
>> Python.
>
> sounds like the same logic applied to python
>
> JFTR I am not quarrelling with Guido's choices; just pointing out your
> inconsistencies
Oh, it's inconsistencies plural is it? So I have more than one? :-)
In Python 3, source files are treated as UTF-8 by default. That means, if you
want to use Unicode characters in your source code (for variable names,
comments, or in strings) you can, and you don't have to declare a special
encoding. Just save the file in an editor that defaults to UTF-8, and Python is
satisfied. If, for some reason, you need some legacy encoding, you can still
explicitly set it with a coding cookie at the top of the file.
That behaviour is exactly analogous to my position that mail and news clients
should default to UTF-8. But in neither case would people be *required* to
include Unicode characters in their text.
--
Steve
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