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From: Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Subject: Re: Python 3 is killing Python
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 23:01:25 +0300
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Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info>:

> Unicode strings in Python 2 are second class entities.

I don't see that. They form a type just like, say, complex.

> It's not just that people will, in general, take the lazy way and
> write "foo" instead of u"foo" for their strings.

People live with their choices, and I don't see the consequences of that
lazy way as very bad.

In fact, I find the lazy use of Unicode strings at least as scary as the
lazy use of byte strings, especially since Python 3 sneaks Unicode to
the outer interfaces of the program (files, IPC).

> But it is that the whole Python virtual machine is based on
> byte-strings, not Unicode strings, and u"" strings are bolted on top.

The internal implementation of the VM is free to change as long as the
external semantics stay the same.

> [steve@ando ~]$ python3.3 -c "π = 3.14; print(π+1)"
> 4.140000000000001
> [steve@ando ~]$ python2.7 -c "π = 3.14; print(π+1)"
>   File "<string>", line 1
>     π = 3.14; print(π+1)
>     ^
> SyntaxError: invalid syntax

My native language uses ä and ö, but I don't see any pressing need to
embed those characters in identifiers.

> Python 2 "helpfully" tries to guess what you want when you work with 
> bytes-pretending-to-be-strings, and when it guesses right, it's nice, but 
> when it guesses wrongly, you'll left with mysterious encoding and 
> decoding errors from code that don't appear to involve either. The whole 
> thing is a mess.

I can't think of a matching example.


Marko