[Python-Dev] Re: Re: Alternative Implementation forPEP292:SimpleString Substitutions (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Wed Sep 8 18:40:37 CEST 2004

Fredrik Lundh wrote:

M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

from a user perspective, there's no reason to make templates a sub- class of unicode, so the rest of your argument is irrelevant. Templates are meant to template text data, so Unicode is the right choice of baseclass from a design perspective. not true. as I've shown in SRE and ElementTree (just to give a few examples), 8-bit strings are superior for the huge subset of all text strings that only contain ASCII data. instead of looking at use patterns, you're stuck defending the existing code. that's not a good way to design usable code. Perhaps I'm missing something, but where would you use Templates for templating binary data (where strings or bytes would be a more appropriate design choice) ? 8-bit strings != binary data. you clearly haven't read my other posts in this thread. please do that, instead of repeating the same bogus arguments over again.

I've read them all and, to be honest, I don't follow your argumentation.

The text interpretation of 8-bit strings is only one possible form of their interpretation. You could just as well have image data in your 8-bit string and calling .lower() on such a string is certainly going to render that image data useless.

The whole point in adding Unicode to the language was to make the difference between text and binary data clear and visible at the type level.

I'm not saying that you can not store text data in 8-bit strings, but that we should start to make use of the distinction between text and binary data.

If we start to store text data in Unicode now and leave binary data in 8-bit strings, then the move to Unicode strings literals will be much smoother in P3k.

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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