[Python-Dev] PEP 383 (again) (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Wed Apr 29 11:25:17 CEST 2009

Thomas Breuel <tmbdev gmail.com> writes:

The error checking isn't necessarily deficient.  For example, a safe and legitimate thing to do is for third party libraries to throw a C++ exception, raise a Python exception, or delete the half surrogate.

Do you have any concrete examples of this behaviour? When e.g. Nautilus shows some illegal UTF-8 filenames in an UTF-8 locale, it replaces the offending bytes with placeholders rather than crash in your face.

PEP 383 is a proposal that suggests changing Python such that malformed unicode strings become a required part of Python and such that Pyhon writes illegal UTF-8 encodings to UTF-8 encoded file systems.

That's again a misleading statement. It only writes an "illegal encoding" if it received one from the filesystem in the first place. A clean filesystem will only receive clean filenames.

Those are big changes, and it's legitimate to ask that PEP 383 address the implications of that choice before it's made.

No, it's legitimate to ask that /you/ back up your arguments with concrete facts. It's difficult to demonstrate the non-existence of a problem. On the other hand, you can easily demonstrate that it exists, if it really does.

By the way, most of those libraries under Unix would take a char * as input, so they wouldn't deal with an "illegal unicode string", they would deal with the original byte string.

Regards

Antoine.

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