[Python-Dev] PEP 383: Non-decodable Bytes in System C haracter Interfaces (original) (raw)

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Tue Apr 28 00:56:05 CEST 2009

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

Antoine Pitrou writes:

> > or (better for 2.x, where bytes are strings as far as most > > programmers are concerned) as a new data type, > > I'm -1 on any new string-like type (for file paths or whatever > else) with custom encoding/decoding semantics. It's the best way to > ruin the clean str/bytes separation that 3.x introduced. Excuse me, but I can't see a scheme that encodes bytes as Unicodes but only sometimes as a "clean separation". It's a dirty hack that makes life a lot easier for Windows programmers and a little easier for many Unix programmers. Practicality beats purity, true, but at the cost of the purity.

The problem you don't address, which is still the reality for most programmers (especially Mac OS X where filesystem encoding is UTF 8), is that programmers are going to treat filenames as strings.

The proposed PEP allows that to work for them - whatever platform their program runs on.

Michael

> Besides, the goal is also to makes things easier for the > programmer. Otherwise, we'll have the same situation as in 2.x > where many English-centric programmers produced code that was > incapable of dealing with non-ASCII input, because they didn't care > about the distinction between str and unicode.

So what you'll get here, AFAICS, is a new situation where many Windows-centric programmers will produce code that's incapable of dealing with non-Unicode input because they don't have to care about the distinction between Unicode and bytes. That's an improvement, but we can do still better and not at huge expense to programmers.

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