[Python-Dev] What to do for bytes in 2.6? (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri Jan 18 05:57:22 CET 2008

Raymond Hettinger writes:

One other thought. I'm guessing that apps that would care about the distinction are already using unicode and are already treating text as distinct from arrays of bytes.

Indeed. Mailman, for instance. Yet Mailman still has problems with (broken) wire protocol that sneaks past the gate, and causes some exception that is only handled by the top-level "no matter what goes wrong, we're not going to lose this post" handler (which literally shunts it into a queue that only human admins look it -- it's not Mailman's problem any more.)

However, I am not sure it would help Mailman to catch such bugs to move from the str/unicode paradigm to the bytes/text paradigm. The problem Mailman faces is that there is no (single) Japanese foyer where the characters have to exchange their muddy "bytes" shoes for nice clean "unicode" slippers. Instead, there are a number of ways to get in, and the translation takes place (and sometimes not) at different stages. But this is not a Python issue; it has to do with Mailman's design.

So I don't think this would be improved if we changed the paradigm forcibly. I don't see a benefit to apps like Mailman from changing over in 2.x.

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