[Python-Dev] PEP 414 (original) (raw)

Lennart Regebro regebro at gmail.com
Sat Mar 3 11:02:56 CET 2012

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 10:26, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

Lennart Regebro <regebro gmail.com> writes:

So the question is if you have any proposal that is less confusing while still being practical. Because we do need to distinguish between binary, Unicode and "native" strings. Isn't this the least confusing solution? It's a matter of the degree of confusion caused (hard to assess) and also a question of taste, so there will be differing views on this. Considering use of unicodeliterals, 'xxx' for text, b'yyy' for bytes and with a function wrapper to mark native strings, it becomes clear that the native strings are special cases - much less encountered when looking at code compared to 'xxx' / b'yyy',

I'm not sure that's true at all. In most cases where you support both Python 2 and Python 3, most strings will be "native", ie, without prefix in either Python 2 or Python 3. The native case is the most common case.

In terms of practicality, it is IMO quite practical (assuming 2.5 / earlier support can be dropped) to move to a 2.6+/3.x-friendly codebase, e.g. by using Armin's python-modernize.

I think there is some misunderstanding here. The binary/unicode/native separation is only possible on Python 2.6 and 2.7 at the moment, unless you use function wrappers like b().

//Lennart

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