[Python-Dev] PEP 414 - Unicode Literals for Python 3 (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Tue Feb 28 19:27:23 CET 2012

On 2/28/2012 7:10 AM, Vinay Sajip wrote:

The PEP 314 approach seems to assume that that if things work on 3.3, they will work on 3.2/3.1/3.0 without any changes other than replacing u'xxx' with 'xxx'.

(Delete 3.0. 3.1 is also less of a concern.) It actually assumes that if things work on 3.3 and 2.7 (or .6), then ... . At first glance, this seems reasonable. If the code works on 2.7, then it does not use any new 3.3 features. Nor does it depend on any 3.3-only bug fixes that were part of a feature patch. 2.6, of course, is essentially not getting any bugfixes.

In other words, you aren't supposed to want to e.g. test 3.2 and 3.3 iteratively, using a workflow which intersperses edits with running tests using 3.2 and running tests with 3.3.

Anyone who is also targeting 3.2 could run a test32 script whenever they need to take a break. Or it could be run in the background (perhaps on a different core) while editing continues. People will work this out on a project by project basis, or use one of the other solutions.

In any case, a single code base seems not to be possible across 2.6+/3.0/3.1/3.2/3.3+ using the PEP 314 approach, though of course one will be possible for just 2.6+/3.3+. Early adopters of 3.x seem to be penalised by this approach: I for one will try to use the unicodeliterals approach wherever I can.

Early adoption of new tech typically has costs as well as benefits ;-).

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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