[Python-Dev] unicodeobject.c,2.139,2.140 checkin (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal@lemburg.com
Thu, 25 Apr 2002 20:39:27 +0200

I don't know why it is, but Unicode always seems to unnecessarily heat up any discussion involving it. I would really like to know what is causing this: is it a religious issue, does it have to do with the people involved or is Unicode inherently controversial ?

In any case, I wasn't looking for a fight when requesting to back out Martin's changes.

Tim Peters wrote:

[MAL] > Tim, I don't get it... why all the fuzz about some missing asserts? They were requested repeatedly, and would have saved everyone hours of debugging time. You didn't add asserts when requested, and didn't oppose them either -- they just got ignored.

Tim, I wasn't aware that you were requesting to add these. I remember that you mentioned something about using assert()s in the Python core many months ago after a discussion with Guido about this, but it wasn't clear to me that you wanted me to add assert()s to the codecs.

The reason I wasn't adding assert()s is simply that I normally don't use them in C programming. This example shows that it would probably have been better to do so and I'll try to remember this for the future.

The last two times this routine was implicated in memory corruption, you assumed it was a pymalloc bug, and Martin had to do all the work of indentifying the true cause and then convincing you of that. The first time that was understandable, but the second time it wasn't; then that the third version of the code still didn't try to catch overwrites was over the edge.

True, the code was complicated due to the many different paths the codec could take. In the last version, I ripped out all the counting code because of the troubles it caused previously.

In any case, before spending too much time understanding the code, why didn't you just ask for a better explanation ? I would have been the last to deny that request.

> I must have missed Barry post, sorry.

Barry filed the latest bug report, and you closed it. The memory corruption showed up as a bad UTF-8 translation in Mailman: http://www.python.org/sf/541828

True, but Martin and you continued discussing the bug after it had been closed. I hadn't read those messages, because I thought they were part of the usual SF duplication of message delivery. Sorry about that.

> I didn't leave out the asserts for any reason -- just didn't think > about using them.

You would have had you read the comments on the bug reports you closed, so I'm not sure what to make of that. I'll be happy if you use asserts in the future, when the code is getting too tricky to be obviously correct; that shouldn't need to be a protracted battle.

Will do. Again, there was no fight intended.

assert(peace),

Marc-Andre Lemburg CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH

Company & Consulting: http://www.egenix.com/ Python Software: http://www.egenix.com/files/python/