[Python-Dev] thoughts on the bytes/string discussion (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Fri Jun 25 00:20:52 CEST 2010

On 6/24/2010 4:59 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

But I wouldn't go so far as to claim that interpreting the protocols as text is wrong. After all we're talking exclusively about protocols that are designed intentionally to be directly "human readable"

I agree that the claim "':' is just a byte" is a bit shortsighted.

If the designers of the protocols had intended to use uninterpreted bytes as protocol markers, they could and I suspect would have used unused control codes, of which there are several. Then there would have been no need for escape mechanisms to put things like :<> into content text.

I am very sure that the reason for specifying ascii byte values was to be crysal clear as to what character was meant and to exclude use on the internet of the main imcompatible competitor encoding -- IBM's EBCDIC -- which IBM used in all of its networks. Until the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s (and IBM originally saw that as a minor sideline and something of a toy), there was a battle over byte encodings between IBM and everyone else.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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