[Python-Dev] Dict suppressing exceptions (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Aug 10 23:33:38 CEST 2006

On 8/10/06, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Guido van Rossum schrieb: > Hmm... Here's an idea... How about we change unicode-vs-str eq to > issue a warning (and return False) instead of raising > UnicodeException?

I'm in favour of having this eq just return False. I don't think the warning is necessary, and believe that people will complain about getting it, but if that is the only way to achieve consensus, so be it.

Not sure I agree. I think that users would find it disturbing (and it could hide bugs) if u"\xff" == "\xff" returned False without warning while u"\x7f" == "\x7f" returns True.

> A warning would arguably have the same helping effect. (I suspect > actually that we would have used warnings all along except we didn't > have the warning framework when unicode was first introduced.)

I believe we would have neither had we rich comparisons available at the time. That unicode-vs-str-eq raises an exception is just a fall-out of not supporting cmp (and it is good that cmp is not supported - there is no meaningful way to order str/unicode if the string is not in the system encoding).

Maybe. I agree that 3-way compare has no business guessing the ordering of u"\xff" and "\xff". I'm not so sure that if we'd had rich comparison we'd have chosen eq to return False for these.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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