[Python-Dev] bytes.from_hex() (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Sun Feb 19 20:04:41 CET 2006

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

Do you do any of the user education about codec use that you recommend? The people I try to teach about coding invariably find it difficult to understand. The problem is that the near-universal intuition is that for "human-usable text" is pretty much anything *but Unicode* will do.

It really is a matter of education. For the first time in my career, I have been teaching the first-semester programming course, and I was happy to see that the text book already has a section on text and Unicode (actually, I selected the text book also based on whether there was good discussion of that aspect). So I spent quite some time with data representation (integrals, floats, characters), and I hope that the students now "got it".

If they didn't learn it that way in the first semester (or already got mis-educated in highschool), it will be very hard for them to relearn. So I expect that it will take a decade or two until this all is common knowledge.

Regards, Martin

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