[Python-Dev] Python-3.0, unicode, and os.environ (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sat Dec 6 06:31:51 CET 2008

Nick Coghlan writes:

True, but it's still a fairly important problem to have a solution to. Even internally in large organisations there can be some pretty insane environments as cruft accumulates over the years.

M&A and globalization makes it inevitable.

Toshio will remember the Mizuho April Fool's Day fiasco (a couple of large banks merged, and when they reopened as a merged entity called "Mizuho", the ATM system immediately crashed).

Japan being a country that doesn't believe in GAAP, such mergers are a very difficult problem. I don't know the details, but I wouldn't even be surprised if encodings played a role in that mess because Japanese companies often have their own internal variants of the national standard JIS encoding.

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