Cult-like behaviour [was Re: Kindness]
Terry Reedy
tjreedy at udel.edu
Mon Jul 16 14:42:09 EDT 2018
On 7/15/2018 4:09 PM, Jim Lee wrote:
>
>
> On 07/15/18 12:37, MRAB wrote:
>> To me, Unicode and UTF-8 aren't things to be reserved for I18N. I use
>> them as a matter of course because I find it a lot easier to stick
>> with just one encoding, one that will work with _any_ text I have.
>
> Which is exactly the same rationale for using any other single encoding
> (including ASCII). If the text you deal with is not multi-lingual, why
> complicate matters by trying to support a plethora of encodings which
> will never be used (and the attendant opportunity for more bugs)?
What you are describing -- supporting hundreds of encodings with
occasional bugs, including multiple encodings in a single string --
describes the text as bytes mess. Switching to unicode strings was a
vast simplification. Being able to dump the hundreds of byte encoding
would be a further simplification, but it will be decades or more before
we can do that ;-)
> Note that I'm *not* saying Unicode is *bad*, just that it's an
> unnecessary complication for a great deal of programming tasks.
I do not understand what you mean by 'unicode is complication'. From
the viewpoint of core developers, it is a simplification.
> For a
> great deal more, it's absolutely necessary. That why I said a "smart"
> language would make it easy to turn on and off.
What you mean by 'turn unicode off'?
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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